our climb-seven-sets-of-stairs-
when-the-kahraba-was-out
apartment in Achrafieh

teta accidentally burning the
skin of my arm with her eleventh
cigarette of the day
always a whiskey glass in hand
somehow
always both full and very very empty

the only picture of me and jiddo
one whole more than any memory

the admittedly fantastical custom-
built balcony swimming pool

the view

the mustashfa right across the
street where we were all(?) born

the fights,
arguments, and
other things that we now can label
“trauma”

the silence after

the silences in between

her makeup brush packed thick
with such excess blush
large hairspray bottles, golden
signature staples

the little attic

the bathroom window that
balloon flew out of
mine or yours?

the stitches
(my uncoordinated fault, promise)

then way later

this song

originally published in Etchings 36.2, Literary and Fine Arts Magazine of the University of Indianapolis, Spring 2024

---

GHina Sadek was born and raised in Lebanon up until the summer of 2007. Since, it’s been the USA and a series of one identity and existential crisis, one lesson learned after another. She is a mom, aunt, sister, daughter, friend. She is not a writer.

Writer’s Statement: “It wrote itself. At 5:17pm on Wed, October 26, 2023, Dalida’s ‘Je suis malade’ played after years and years since last being heard or even thought about. Then, immediately, it wrote itself. There was nothing else to do but let it. And I should’ve seen it coming. For how could three agonizingly devastating weeks (and counting) of relentless despicable atrocities pass through the head, heart, and soul without that guttural instinctual craving of family, of home, of innocently ignorant times. It can’t. Or maybe it’s that I wouldn’t let it. Anyway, here we are.”