The Nights Are Coming in Abundance

Sara Elkamel

“He wraps the night around the day, and wraps the day around the night.”

— The Quran: 39:5.

God has skinned the day

again. I sleep through

the music stowed inside

my husband’s ears—

our love suspended

upside down by its feet.

In whose irreversible skin

can I put myself?

Night’s pelt too

will peel off like a sock.

about the author
Sara Elkamel

Sara Elkamel

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, among other publications. A Pushcart Prize winner, Elkamel was also awarded Southeast Review’s 2023 Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Michigan Quarterly Review's 2022 Goldstein Poetry Prize, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

Other works by Sara Elkamel


On Every Night