Fahad Al-Amoudi

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A Silver Child

Baba washes in the thin acetate of my rancid 
cackle when he shows me a black and white photo.

Delicate between my fingers I hold this Claymation child,
emboldened with the scars of an unyielding breeze, a kidney-

finish bruising his cheeks and raised blood vessels
girdling his face into this expression:         unblinking.

Here is my father staring down his self-exile.
I think he’s heard it somewhere before, my laughter

jewelled in concave, a soundwave of beaded opal
kids outside the headmaster’s office shimmering in the

lines of his forehead. He adds one part still, two parts sparkling water,
mixes the silver solution in his glass and drinks; toast to the 

Never-child. Tonight, he tells me of the classroom and teachers
oblonged in white lab coats, their fingers chalky-grey,

pressing the collars of schoolchildren and pulling threads apart like
qat, their busy voices leaving doors ajar, and electric feet kicking

rubble like spores off the screaming plateau. On these visits,
seldom long, I like to imagine that the Nile divided

the makeshift football pitch; imagine my father emerging, his afro
untouched, the break of the shore filming over his smile,

verdant as the garden at the back of the shop, as Grandma
Weyzero washes down panes of glass in a town on the edge of

extinction. Here in this restaurant, waxed in a frame of candlelight,
years unfold their reams of white space, my father their most loyal

zealot.

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FAHAD AL-AMOUDI is a poet of Ethiopian and Yemeni heritage based in London. He is an Obsidian alumnus, graduate of the Writing Squad and member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen.