Breakwater Review

“Keloids” brilliantly articulates the entangled and complex emotions of medically tending to a daughter after a state-sponsored bombing. The traumatic nature of the event is fully revealed in the poem’s tone and structure which oscillates between verse and prose lines, much like the speaker’s role as mother and doctor. More than rendering us aware of the duality of the speakers’ identity, the poem does the work of witnessing, each utterance sutures not just the speaker’s psychic wounds, but, for the moment, our world spiritually harmed by global violence.

Words from Major Jackson on our 2025 Peseroff Poetry Poem

Keloids

by Seema Jilani

my daughter’s scars are raised welts / when Beirut

smashed its glass into her / my steely doctor hands

kept us whole / she will survive a blast / but

we never forget the despair of watching a parent cry

limbs hemorrhage / so do braveries / I cradle her / lullabye

her alive / a man’s head drips warm blood on us / pretend

we are swimming / I coax / she oscillates / wavy consciousness /

we double helix / like when she suckled my breasts / nursing,

doctoring

call ortho / I say in my best physician voice / our ER

doesn’t take orders from nannies they say / I realize

I am still brown / my daughter is still white / and we are

still in Beirut, after all / I doctor anyway / calculate her

ketamine / push IVs / her eyes zip horizontal / no more

pain / I gift her amnesia too / then switch back to

mama / tender forehead strokes to congealed hair

this ache, it is mothering.

I birthed a child / not my pain, not a friend, not myself,

just her / sometimes, I will be the one wounding her /

sometimes, she will break me

my mamma says men can’t stomach grief / you turn away / can’t

look / I lend one hand to her syringe / the other to your shoulder

it is mothering, this ache.

Seema Jilani currently serves as a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Truman National Security Fellow, and was previously a Senior Fulbright Scholar to Istanbul. She has briefed the United Nations Security Council, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the State Department, and senior officials at The White House and National Security Council. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, PBS NewsHour, The New York Times Magazine, The Independent and The Guardian. Jilani was a Bread Loaf Writers Workshop participant in 2022 and also twice participated in the Voices of Our Nations Arts Writer’s Workshop. She was accepted to Tin House Writer’s Workshop, but was unable to attend due to her daughter’s ongoing recovery after the Beirut Blast.