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2023 Academy of American Poets Prize

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My Grandfather’s Broken English

by Jenna Hoinke

arabic has no plurals my grandfather speaks only absolutes, sentences pillar-hard: that cost ten dollar. i make chai.  in a pot of iraqi tea cardamom breaks open, a tongue in a mouth warm and wagging. he arrived in the sixties as a baker’s boy with only a fistful of pocket change, a charcuterie of secondhand english borrowed from american westerns, his speech a stained-glass window, a collaboration of languages.  he knew not how to read the great gatsby, but how to taste the danger of rising dictators, how to listen for saddam’s sons-in-law as they rattled the baghdadi streets, noosed to honorary hearse, cans at a wicked wedding. he carries a homeland he cannot return to, erases his name for american ease, easier, with a butcher’s knife in hand, to slice jalal into jerry, but he spells my name with too many letters, carves it into jannah, translates it to the word for heaven as though i am prayer in miniature, he chants litanies at easter in words half-shattered by the lie of a unified state.  shimid baba o brona, o ruhad quidsha.  amen, amen. the church they baptized him in houses more bullet holes now than babies dunked in baptismal fonts.  tel keppe, cradle of chaldeans, a flattened hostage, a half-ruin, a ziggurat of lost history.  here, he shuts his eyes, pretends his accent is not why tsa pulls him from airport lines to pat him down, looking for bombs from a man whose birthplace is bombed out. when he speaks, white ears asphyxiate, what? can you say that again? i just don’t understand you. can you be easier to understand? my grandfather parts his lips and whispers words that turn to dust.

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