Safa Khatib

- Washington University in St. Louis, United States of America -

Safa Khatib is a poet and editor living in St. Louis, Missouri. Her poems, essays, interviews and translations recently appear in the 2026 Forward Book of Poetry, Mizna, the White Review and Wasafiri. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Track for International Writers at Washington University, the Stadler Center for Writing, the Fulbright Program, and the Global Comparative Humanities Working Group. She is the author of A Dress of Locusts (Bloomsbury 2025), which has been called “a blend of dream, riddle, parable and prophecy.” She directs Lunette Press.

Composed with bold, economical precision, Khatib’s debut comprises a blend of dream, riddle, parable, and prophecy. The book’s title is spoken by Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war. This is, incredibly, an apt punctum for the book’s meditations on desire, faith, and ancient continuities between the so-called “West” and “(Middle) East”. Khatib’s wildly ambitious imagination collapses those divisions and defies contemporary geopolitical premises. The book’s idiosyncratic spirituality and vision are matched by its delightful, playful earthiness. Essential reading

DAVE COATES, Poetry Book Society (Summer Bulletin)

I am spellbound by these poems, their heartfelt percussion, their clean slice of precision. Safa Khatib’s poems open my eyes, sharpen my ears. Here is a poet I will read in every eternity

SAFIA ELHILLO, author of Girls That Never Die

A Dress of Locusts suggests that memory can be ephemeral and speech an effort not quite realized. And yet, for Khatib, these realities are no excuse. Without admonishment, but with a meditative clarity, Khatib calls us to account for the ways we have – and continue to – turn eyes away from the historic now

NIKI HERD, author of The Stuff of Hollywood

Safa Khatib’s poems take us everywhere and nowhere. They take us to the river and bring us back thirsty. They are suspended in the in-between – in the pockets of the body, in late visits to the ruins, in the phone calls demanding a life together. Khatib does not shy away from Empire by hiding in the interior, she blurs both topographies into one

MONA KAREEM, author of I Will Not Fold These Maps

More about the poet

Poetry

The Distances /

The light was not blue but violet. A voice I remember,
Sumerian, approaching red, raised, resembling
yours. The riding crop against my skin I asked for––
that you come in and welt my lifted thighs. You did.
My clit: the nothing that is.
No home. No promise but presence.
You’re facing me, holding my hips. This overwhelm
we wander to. Again the pain of what I cannot know
of you penetrates me. A simple scene, not final––
paradise revised, repetitious: this room of grief and pleasure.
And so? What will we risk? I’ll go as far as you’ll take me,
out of hell, or in. Yes, dear, I’ll hold you there.
Instances of Ishtar /

I.

I am racked
                        by memories

            of the goddess––

In one, she hands me
a dress
            of locusts. It gleams

a red gaze. I put it on.
It seems

my body hums,
a gathering
                        of long muted voices.

I walk with her

through the cedar forest
which opens
                        onto a shoreline

covered in wires
and weapons
                      and bulbs––
the waste
                                    of cities.

We stare into the waves––
II.

In another memory,
I am standing over dark water

where a stranger is
greedily drinking.

Turning toward me, the stranger cries

            lama sabachthani

                        Why have you

            forsaken me

The corrupted
                         cry of Christ, but godless––

I sift through the sand.
The faceless doll washes up

in my hands, my mind
a grey storm,
                        the bell

of me, soundless––

She is always at a distance,
turning back––
III.

Sometimes the sea was
the border
                  between freedom

and lament––
                        I lived centuries

in transit. I heard
Al-Khansā, Cassandra,

the disenchanted prophets, women

of Greece
                  and Palestine and Iraq––

We walked the coast in fits of laughter
and mourning
                        toward

Helen who sat on a bed
of driftwood
                             weaving

jeweled garments:
                               anecdota

            tawarīkh

records of the days, the days––

            my soul:
                                    a shutter
which opens
                         and opens . . .
As for What’s Left /

The imam, in those days, owned three animals:
one winged, one beaked but wingless now, for injury,
one hooved—or that’s how he explained them
as we rested, half-clothed, in front of the mihrab
long after the other worshippers had left. The smell
of their bodies still lingered in the carpets,
so that as he entered me, it was difficult
to feel we were alone, exactly, or that there was
much difference, in the end, between the undisciplined
motion of fucking and the more predictable motion
of those who come daily to bow to you, Lord. Once,
I described you to another, whose singing voice
I’ve nearly forgotten by now, as a fog-hidden insect
crawling the ground of the mind . . . That doesn’t
seem true anymore. I would pray with the others.
But after, I would wait for all to leave but the one
who led the prayer, the one in whom I thought I saw
what you deny me, as if sex were where the distinctions
I’d for so long been taught—between reason
and ecstasy, duty and joy—might, as I reached
back for him, lose their power . . . That’s how
naïve I was. Nothing really changed. After each night,
I’d drive home to my neighbor, who would weep
simply, openly, as I rubbed his neuropathic feet.
Yet it is true that what I once called my sorrow-
unto-death—a dark lake in which there is only to drift
until lost for good—I began, in the mosque, to see
more clearly as mere sorrow, as the color I’d assigned
to the lake, with which the lake had nothing to do.
After the Iliad 24. 1–20 /

Then the assembly dispersed to the ships,

                                                the soldiers craving food and sleep––

but Akheel stayed back. . .

*

Ahora el desvelo domina
el sueño-quedominaeldolor . . .

*

He mourned over Patroklos, remembering his nerve

                                    and how many battles bihi juhdan ma’an

and how many seaswells nālahuma al-juhd

*

He turned onto his left side, then again upon his face
y el dolor aumentó

*

Se levantó.
                        Multa’an.
                                                Lágrimas, lágrimas . . .

As one who’s lost his mind roams the harsh shore
he wandered until by light of dawn

sea and land grew bright––

*

Then he yoked his horse to the chariot,
and to the back of the chariot

                                                he tied Hector

and rode, dragging him around the pyre
three times

            then returned exhausted to the tents

y le abandonó

                                face-down, sprawled out en al-tarab––
The Executioner /

I loved his touch. I touched
myself. I knew from want

his voice would break. He was
in me. I held his fears.

Safa Khatib

- Washington University in St. Louis, United States of America -

Poetry

The Distances /

Instances of Ishtar /

I.

II.

III.

As for What’s Left /

After the Iliad 24. 1–20 /

The Executioner /