by Majda Gama

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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“Strange Stars Pulsate According to the Golden Ratio”
The BBC headline & a snapshot of Lindsay Lohan
carrying a copy of the holy Quran run parallel on a news site.
Perhaps raw, almond-milk chai was too ordinary for her
so she turned to the book of a more exotic people.
Can America ever forgive her for reaching beyond yoga & rehab
into the terrain of the enemy? I mean, Jane Fonda is still
paying the price for looking eastward.
I like my life dry, like the lips an aesthetician told me she could fix,
use sugar-based fillers to fill in lines from smoking,
fill up the rosy skin browning with middle age.
Sure, the corners are downturned, someone needs to walk
around looking angry & I’m angry that the plump face of youth
is now the face I’m expected to buy back, just as my cheekbones
are emerging. FFS, Lindsey’s now allowed her lips to deflate.
After thinking all this through, I see The Archdruid Report
proclaim we are at peak meaninglessness.

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Majda Gama is the author of The Call of Paradise, selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2022 Two Sylvias chapbook prize. Her full-length poetry manuscript won the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award and will be published in 2025. She is the 2023 Shenandoah Graybeal-Gowen award recipient for Virginia poets. Her poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, where she is a 2024 Gregory Djanikian scholar, Ploughshares, POETRY, Shenandoah, Tahoma, and We Call to the Eye & the Night (Persea Press) an anthology of love poems by Arab Anglophone poets. They are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner and TriQuarterly.

by Majda Gama

“Strange Stars Pulsate According to the Golden Ratio”

The BBC headline & a snapshot of Lindsay Lohan

carrying a copy of the holy Quran run parallel on a news site.

Perhaps raw, almond-milk chai was too ordinary for her

so she turned to the book of a more exotic people.

Can America ever forgive her for reaching beyond yoga & rehab

into the terrain of the enemy? I mean, Jane Fonda is still

paying the price for looking eastward.

I like my life dry, like the lips an aesthetician told me she could fix,

use sugar-based fillers to fill in lines from smoking,

fill up the rosy skin browning with middle age.

Sure, the corners are downturned, someone needs to walk

around looking angry & I’m angry that the plump face of youth

is now the face I’m expected to buy back, just as my cheekbones

are emerging. FFS, Lindsey’s now allowed her lips to deflate.

After thinking all this through, I see The Archdruid Report

proclaim we are at peak meaninglessness.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Majda Gama is a Saudi-American poet based Washington, DC where she has roots as a Punk DJ and an activist. She has read her poetry at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature and Split This Rock 2018. Majda is a Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Fairy Tale Review, The Normal School, Slice, and The South Dakota Review. Majda is a poetry editor for Tinderbox.