My name is Safia Elhillo, and this poem is called "to make use of water." dilute i forget the arabic word for economy i forget the english word for عسل forget the arabic word for incense & english word for مسكين arabic word for sandwich english for صيدلية & مطعم & وله /stupid girl, atlantic got your tongue/ blur back home we are plagued by a politeness so dense even the doctors cannot call things what they are my grandfather’s left eye swirled thick with smoke what my new mouth can call glaucoma while the arabic still translates to the white water swim i want to go home dissolve i want to go home drown half don’t even make it out or across you get to be ungrateful you get to be homesick from safe inside your blue american passport do you even understand what was lost to bring you here. My name is Safia Elhillo, and the title of my poem is “To Make Use of Water”. Around the time of writing this poem, I’d made the decision that I wanted to try and get closer in my writing to how language functions in my head. In any moment that I am speaking entirely in English or entirely in Arabic, there’s always a part of me that’s translating. If I write the word in the language it occurs to me in, then what’s that going to look like? What’s that going to feel like? How can I make that work? I was sitting down to write this poem about water, and this idea of being diluted was one of the first things that presented itself to me. There’ve been a lot of questions about dilution throughout my life. About my identity being dilute, my fluency being diluted, my ‘Sudaneseness’ being diluted, my ‘Americanness’ being diluted. And then I was thinking a lot about the body in water. So the idea of swimming as, sort of, a voluntary way to get to and from somewhere, whereas something like dissolving is more of a surrender, more of a release. “Blue” by Carl Phillips, which I think is the poem that gave me permission to use obsession as my primary tool in my writing. Also it’s just a really beautiful poem. I love it.