Project Description
Catherine Davidson
Catherine Temma Davidson is a poet and novelist who grew up in Los Angeles, California and now lives in London with her husband and children. From a Greek and Jewish immigrant background, she often writes about cultural inheritance, crossing borders and the gift of multiple perspectives. She teaches Creative Writing at Regents’ University, and works as a writing coach at Amnesty International. She will be teaching a poetry course focusing on technique for Exiled Writers Ink in 2018. Her novel, The Orchard, is out from Gemma Press in the US in early 2018.
In the middle of the meal I am always making
suddenly, my brother-in-law, Amer appears
like conscience all the way from Orinda, California.
He brings not only his elegant Syrian Lebanese
mother and ten sisters, leaving their shoes carefully
on the threshold before peering into the kitchen;
not only his memories of driving at night during war
to find Beirut’s hidden dance clubs defying gunmen,
or the time his bedroom front wall sheered away
under American bombardment to reveal his flares
and Farah Fawcett poster staring into air, astonished;
not only his extensive medical knowledge needed
to peek into the many ameobas growing in my fridge;
but also, a reminder I have lost something I miss.
Here where the yellow beaker’s juice splats a map
the shape of a lost continent below twice fried food
I serve my kids because I have no time at all, I think
no time to remember so many things, even his hands
with their shapely doctor’s fingers, rinsing each dish
before placing it tenderly in his new world machine,
or the meal he made for us once, in my sister’s house:
zatar, yogurt, farmer’s market lamb, his own pears;
all the ingredients slow civilisation can accomplish.
From Behind the Lines, published by the Word Hoard, 2012