The Book of Ache

Part 1: Departure
1. A Mail to Hell
2. All Fathers Are Bilingual
3. Waiting for God
4. Filicide
5. Filth and Fathers
6. “Is your Father Dead?”
7. Parricide
8. The Dead Are Not Dead
9. Your Daughter Has Problems
10. Looking for Mama
11. Ode to Mother
12. Mary of Sorrows
13. Teaching my Daughter about Death
14. Abortion
Part 2: Port of Call

15. Dada’s Eyes
16. A Conversation
17. Woman Enough
18. Windfalls in Summer
19. Sacrifice
20. Waiting for his Rain
21. Pathology of Love
22. The Night Visitor
23. Cheers to Death
24. My Lover’s Wife
25. Ready, Set, Love!
26. Apology to my Lover
27. The Saddest Story
Part 3: The Home Straight

28. Remembering the Givens
29. Wallflowers Are Black
30. How to Know a Miracle by its Colour
31. The Cost of Coping
32. A Geographical Malfunction
33. Adah’s Anger
34. “Coffee?”
35. Black Salt
36. No One Names their Daughter “Khadija”
37. “Hayat” — A Call for Death
38. Where Homes Hide
39. Black Is Not a Colour
40. “You Ain’t Black, Woman!”
Part 4: Landfall
41. Mémoire (Or Mem-War)
42. Memo-Red
43. A Thing or Two to Know about the War
44. Where God Used to Live
45. The June of Doom
46. New Year’s Eve
47. A Lament for October
48. The Curse
49. The Blackout
50. The Prayer of Jasmine
51. Menopause at Twenty
52. To Doctor G.M
53. To my Fellow Insomniacs
54. Sylvia’s Death
55. Overdose
56. The Performance of a Lifetime
1
A Mail to Hell
Father,
I had to kill you,
three times for the record.
Every time, I counted the years
on your brow
like loose change
and leafed through the photo-albums
on your body,
each photograph nailed to my memory.
How can I forget?
How can daughters forget? —
I wear trauma like a luxury fragrance
everyone can smell on me.
O father,
I could never count your faces.
The Hydra of your expression
never stopped multiplying.
And your fingers,
fat Typhons,
would leave thumps
on my punch-drunk heart.
Father,
by forty, you'd already died three times
and yet, death could not unmake you.
The first time, you held me
between thumb
and forefinger
like a wad of gum
while a bald-headed Lamia
bulged from your lap
and drew blood from mine.
The second time, you left for war.
For two whole years,
your body reeked of sin,
and from under your lies
peeked out
the nylon petticoats —
Some wars are fought over bedsheets, I suppose.
The third time, you fell ill of typhus
and for the first time in years,
2
I started believing in God —
Apparently, prayers are answered faster
when the mailbox says “to hell.”
Father,
if ever this poem sits like a blade against your throat,
do not panic,
do not try and pummel your shell of stone.
To the dead, our words are no more painful
than a pinprick.
3
All Fathers Are Bilingual
Your father isn't cruel —

Like blisters,
he needs time to mellow
before the hard skin could flack off.
He, too, was shamed for
straddling between
houses,
states,
countries,
for keeping a list with more than
22 names
for Home.
He, too, was shamed for
forgetting his mother's face,
for watching her nightgown
billowing out of the backdoor
at 2 in the morning.
He, too, was shamed
for starting fights at school
and waving fists at the other boys,
for picking up the only language
his father spoke.

Life lurched into him
and sent his childhood reeling to the side
at age 6, 7, 8 and 9.
As the wheel of adulthood rolled over,
love was churned into small talk,
swear-words,
thumps,
undue anger.
It is only logical to misread
such fine-print love.
At seventeen,
he was father to his own sister;
moulting the boyhood plumage,
shredding the chiffon dreams,
his heart taut against his ribs
like an elastic band about to snap.
He watched his mother leave in daylight,
his father disappear into the night,
4
but their absence has taught him
to stay.

Like immigrants settled in foreign countries,
wincing at the new language
and stuttering out the unfamiliar sounds,
your father's tongue
is knotted in two different languages:
In the first, he is fluent.
In the second, the words come out
with a stammer.
5
Waiting for God
Baba is a saint.
He wears God like a large cape,
crumples up the sky like a Snickers' wrapper
and slides it into his pocket.
When we were little,
he would let us climb his beard;
the ladder to Allah.
He would recite Al-Fatiha and Yaseen
and we would all ride up his throat like an elevator
and make for the penthouse of Eden.
Baba is a good man.

His mind is a complex manual of ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’
his eyes a speedometer that tracks my pace towards God.
Baba is a good, good man.
The furrows in his brow are a road-map to Heaven.
He promises to drive us there someday
if we behave well.
God, doesn’t he know?

Who’s to tell him I’m no Saint?
Who’s to try and explain to him
the Devil is gutting my bowels,
honing his tusks between my bones?
Who’s to stop Baba
from hurtling towards me
every time the air is heavy
with the char of hell,
prayers chapping his lips,
beads gnawing at his hands
like lice and nits?
Who’s to stand watching him
as he wrings my heart out
like a dirty washcloth
and irons out the kinks in my mind?
“Asma, have you done your prayers?”

and all I could do for an answer
is run,
run,
run
to the type-writer,
6
my heart buckling
in a genuflection,
my skin sloughing off firebrands.
I swear,
I have seen voices like that cleave
the air,
exude a smell of gas-leak,
ignite houses out of nowhere.
God, doesn’t he pay attention?

Doesn’t he see the keys curving
into hooks in my hands?
Doesn’t he see me rowing poems
like paper boats,
flimsy and half-sunk?
Doesn’t he know I’m fishing for God
in the black eddies of my heart?
Doesn’t he notice my faith
washed up to shore like flotsam,
and all my hopes dragged to doom
by the Kraken that prowls my mind?
Doesn’t he notice my throat
bulging with keys,
my mouth spurting molten steel?
Doesn’t Baba at all understand
the keys are devils of nickel and brass
clinking their teeth against mine,
battering my mind
with fists that can tear
the Heavens apart?
Baba, bless him,

stands ten inches away from me
and still,
I cannot paddle out to him,
and still,
I cannot moor my life to his pier.
“Forgive me,”
for I have built a different staircase
that doesn't send me reeling.
“Forgive me,”
for the Devil has spun a cocoon
around my heart
with trails of saliva and snot.
7
“Forgive me,”
for I keep losing
the cape,
the penthouse,
even the map,
and retain the keys
instead.
8
Filicide
Father,
your daughter is dead,
a small parcel
with the label “to hell.”
You were too busy commuting to Heaven,
too busy riding the 4 a.m. shuttle toward God,
too busy buttering your toast with prayers.
Meanwhile, the moon cracks and crackles
into porcelain shards.
Meanwhile, the sky thins into an eggshell
and the sun drools on the earth
a yellowish spit.
Yes, she tried to warn you.
Yes, she tried to love you.
Yet, the thumbscrews
that held God in place
snapped loose
over her head.
Yet, a death,
looming as a parachute,
softly landed on her heart.
So well
she remembers you
threading prayer beads on the wires of her throat,
wadding her heart with angel plumage
until it slumped
into her chest.
So well
she remembers
her notebooks whiplashed
into your fingers,
her poems lying down in neck-braces,
the surgeons ducked
into their scrubs
out of despair.
Just last week, you barged into her room,
a copy of the Koran
bobbing inside your holster
and God slung over your back,
chafing your skin.
Then, your hands,
ten scavengers,
9
pounced on the typing-machine,
flaying it alive,
cold-rolled sinew,
metal carrion.
Father,
Father,
it's no secret now —
your daughter died
of filicide,
though bloodless,
bloodless
and fatherless
as the mottled china
that shatters nightly
over your head.
10
Filth and Fathers
“Close your legs, Fatima!

Babak will kill you!”
When Fatima was little,

her mother used to frown at her
for sitting with legs spread open.
Now, Fatima's legs fan out
to strangers, night after night,
and she is still alive.
Sometimes, the men come

with pitchforks for teeth
and sledgehammers for hands.
Sometimes, Fatima’s body
couldn’t tell the difference
between a kiss and a lash.
Fatima’s father skipped through marriage

as through a bad soap opera,
zapping through parenting
as through detergent ads.
For thirty years, he ran the family
like a bankrupt business
or a lewd tabloid,
competing with the Devil for scoops.
Downtown, he uncorked
tankards,
hearts,
loins,
spilled seeds out of his fat flask,
asserted an overblown manhood.
With the same lips
he haggled over naked skin,
he fired off a volley
of curses and lies
at his family.
Every man who frequented Fatima

carried a gene of her father —
Bilal almost butchered his wife
for an undercooked lunch meal.
Yusuf ironed his daughter's fists
11
so she wouldn't learn to write.
Abdullah returned home every night,
stale with alcohol and ill-luck,
and lay in bed fully dressed
in a mist of female sweat.
Fatima made the terrible mistake

of believing that her father
was every man who was cruel to her
and that by being cruel,
her father was a man.
12
“Is your Father Dead?”
No, not dead

but on a members-only vacation with the Devil.
Tonight, father, I lay beside you for the first time
and collected the years off your skin
like sticky bedbugs.
Gobs of sin smear you like rancid fat.
The body is smacked hard by age,
trampled by the jackboots of time.
How could this happen?
For so long, your albatross body hovered over me,

a giant bird that would not roost.
Now, it nests in my palms,
no bigger than a verdin.
What happened, daddy? What became?
I thought fathers handled death
like a cold or a strep throat.
I thought fathers could take off death
like a wet overcoat
and change into fresh clothes, immediately.
I knew mothers could die,
daughters,
sons,
the gods we created for ourselves,
but not fathers.
Not fathers!
What’s here?
Your chin flopping like a shot pigeon.
Your tongue drooping, soggy as a pickle.
Have I missed something?
With your Moses fingers,
you used to muss the sea
like a baby's scalp
and while away the hours
quaffing pint after pint of sunlight —
This summer, you returned sea-sick
and we watched your miracles collapse
like fainting women.
13
What’s next?
Someone should’ve asked
before death could answer.
Isn’t life always long overdue anyhow?
We should’ve known, daddy,

melanoma had been cruising off
the shoals of your skin
and how quickly the black tide would flush you out.
We should’ve known
the Atlantic of your body
would be eventually drained up by death.
Is this how fathers die?

Maybe I would’ve known had you lived like one!
For years, I’ve tried to clamber up your jaw.

I’d turn all slithery with your phlegm,
all fusty with your nicotine breath.
Remember, daddy?
Remember your heart
twining its tendrils
around my mouth?
For five years, I could not speak,
your branches bunching around my throat
in tight fists.
For five whole years,
the words got tangled up
in the mesh of your beard.
Now, I hold out your heart,
a charred stump:
I can finally speak.
Here, let me help you pack

before you go sun-tanning on the coast of hell.
Look daddy, I shall not grieve.

I shall not sicken
inside the gas-chamber of your memory.
I shall not let my twenty years
fatten into tanks of tears.
Only tonight did I realize
fathers are only gods —
14
We make them up
and they look just like this:
15
Parricide
(Inspired by Sylvia Plath)
Daddy,
I haven't spoken in years.
When I was nine,
I tried to
talk,
talk,
talk
to you
but your pomade clogged my mouth
and your barbwire moustache
snagged my throat.
When I turned thirteen,

I tried to call your name,
but it would only come out in gags.
“Ach”
“Ach”
“Ach”
People now think you’re a German.
At eighteen,
I stumbled over your voice
inside another man,
heavy as a jackboot,
stomping on my throat
with dirty soles —
You don’t know, daddy.
You don’t know how much poetry
it takes me
to forgive you.
You don’t know how much silence
it has taken me
to birth this voice.
I hope you believe me, daddy.
I hope you believe me when I say:
Writing is easy.
Learning how to hold an X-Acto knife
instead of a pen
is the difficult part.
16
I hope you forgive me, daddy,
for undressing you
in front of the type-writer,
for shrouding you
in so much rhetoric.
It must be uncomfortable for you
to learn about your death
from the catacomb
of a poem.
I’m not sure how else to tell you this:
Poetry is the only place
where pen-holders
and bullet-cases
get mixed up
irrevocably.
I’ve tried, daddy.

I’ve tried to fit inside my mouth
the prayers,
the 114 surahs,
the 7,563 hadith,
the “Bismillah,”
the “Allahu Akbar,”
the “Astaghfirullah,”
the Abu-Bakr,
the Khadija,
the Madonna
until they all bunged up my throat,
until one day,
my jaw snapped at the seams.
I’ve been speaking in halves ever since.
When I say “I love you,”
it could mean:
“I am still trying to find a way
to love you
without getting hurt”
or
“Writing this kind of poetry
is the kindest way I know
to hate you”
Daddy,
will I ever learn how to speak
without feeling your grip
17
tightened around my throat,
without feeling your entire body
rammed into my mouth hole?
How can I ever write
when every poem stinks
of your narghile,
when every metaphor
drips of your drool?
You are a lump in the throat,
a bullet lodged between my tonsils
that I have to live with.
Daddy,
you owe me.
You owe me twenty-five years of
talk,
talk,
talk.
My mouth is ringed with gatekeepers,
checking for
slips,
kisses,
names of unchaste men,
ensuring I have the kind of tongue
that licks up cultural dregs.
I have sucked on prison bars for so long
the alphabet tastes of
cold metal and tarnish.
Even my poems
are stunted children.
A sneeze,
a hiccup
from you
and they bend over,
cowering in shame and terror.
Even mother scorns you

and breakfasts on fresh spite
each morning.
Her heart in your hands
an artichoke
blooming with prickles.
You bleed
and bleed,
18
thinking
this must be love, indeed.
Daddy,
you are dead.
Long ago, you were sealed away
in the sepulchre of my heart
that you had chiselled yourself.
I’ve tended your skeleton like a pet
ever since.
I do not loathe you, father.
I only wish you dumb
or demented
or gone.
There's a difference, you see.
And even if I wanted you dead,
poetry would keep getting in the way.
I know you love me

but love rambles over my heart
like poison ivy.
I know you love me
but love where cuddles
overlap with choke-holds
isn't love,
couldn’t be love.
Daddy,
I am twenty-five now,
walking in and out of men
with lancets and compress,
trying to save men like you,
men who hold out a fistful
of crumpled hearts,
men who kiss
with whips
between their lips.
Over the years,
I have crashed into so many
cultural barriers
my skin is crusted
with rust and grit.
And so, I shall kill you, father,
over and over again
19
until the alphabet stops leaking
fat and filament
in my mouth,
until the stench of syllables
stops making me retch.
Mother says men like you

go straight to hell
and I’m not sorry you will —
I always knew we had to meet again
some place or other!
20
The Dead Are Not Dead
The last time I saw you,

you were nine,
your eyes two burnt cities,
your face one giant tear.
Castile soap could not undo
the Marlboro stench
sticking to your lips.
Your mother,
a dried-out plum,
scurried around the house like an escaped victim,
her prune legs shrivelling with every stride,
her only words the chuffing of a steam engine.
“I'm sorry what happened to Si-Abdullatif.
He was a good man.”
I stammered the words out,
my mouth suddenly marked out like a crime-scene.
I could feel Abdullatif’s pickaxe eyes
puncturing the wall opposite me,
the entire house a faded watercolour
against the complexion of his rage.
Your mother sewed you onto her body
like a waistband.
Her breath smelled of stale prayers
and sour incantations.
When she was sixteen,
Abdullatif climbed up the ruffles on her nightgown
and wrung the pulp out
of her thighs.
No other woman would make him eat
for the next forty years
like your mother.
Now, Abdullatif is a framed photograph
piercing the front wall,
the face pinned to your mother's chest,
chewing on tears
and stolen Marlboro smokes.
21
Your Daughter Has Problems
(Inspired by Warsan Shire and Sabah Khodir)
Your daughter has problems.

She runs her nails on chalkboards,
bangs kitchen platters,
gargles ice-cold water.
Your daughter knows pain
like a close relative.
Her body is a gallery
of all the men who hurt her,
a screenplay of everything
she lost herself to.

She sits with strangers
and nurses their sprained hearts,
her skin smelling of neroli
and clean laundry,
of freshly brewed coffee
and whole wheat bread,
of Home.
Do you not warn her?
Do you not tell her
that women who fold their hearts
into Band-Aids
end up needing one,
that women who live
on potluck love
end up starving?
You are her father —

How do you not warn her?

She collects broken men
like stamps,
pockets aching hearts
like pennies.
You should have seen her
rolling her skin
into plaster cast,
stretching her body
like a makeshift bed,
22
her heart pleated
into a napkin.
She refuses to sit
with the good men,
converse with the good men,
show love to the good men.
And when the good men
try to crawl into her poems,
she runs to her desk
and writes about the men
who hurt her instead.
You are her father —

How do you not see her
wearing kisses
like birthmarks,
tattooing memories
onto her body,
dousing her heart
in bleach and paraffin?
How do you forget to warn her
that women who house men
inside their bodies
end up homeless,
that she cannot keep loving
with her heart on loan?
How do you forget?
How can fathers forget?
She is your daughter —
You should have seen her
smoothing out the creases in her heart,
unrolling her body
into a map of scars,
into a calendar chart
of all the times she wrote
the good men away
and hurried to her desk
to write
about
y
o
u
.
23
Looking for Mama
Mama,
how do you do it?
All those babies
sliding in and out of you;
breadsticks out of the oven,
nickels out of the slot
of a slot-machine.
The face is taped to your head
like a poster
and your dandelion eyes
disperse into the air,
into the air.
For years, I could not see you,
dumped into the black, black
moss of your hair.
I could never find your face,
always getting lost in a mound
of diapers and shoe-lace.
As to your heart,
it dangles from your chest,
a burnt bulb,
an old pendant,
a most useless,
useless
thing.
Even your smile is propped up
with poles and pegs.
Mama,
where do you hide,
most days?
Sucklings grab
at your breasts,
at your legs,
at your brains,
little pincers unscrewing your body
nerve by nerve,
vein by vein.
It won't be long
before each tendon begins to sag.
A kind of spineless jelly
will replace your body,
24
a bobble-head,
a caricature of your old self.
But mama, no,
I shall never grow
to be like you;
the life-size dolly
with the missing head,
pushing her trolley
of babies and babies into the alley
that leads to death.
Mama,
why haven’t you told me before
that my body comes with a lease,
that it expires by thirty,
that it runs out
if I am not
engaged,
married
or juggling a heavy heart
and a swollen belly? —
I tuck my virginity
into the lining of my skirt.
It takes some getting used to; the shame,
like everything else.
25
Ode to Mother
Mother,
a miasma of fifty years hangs over your body
like stale sheets,
but still, your heart is unmarked as a slate,
a baby's smile at six months.
It looks nothing like the vomit stain
on my left breast.
I wear my twenty years like a golden cerecloth.
Age smells on me like cremation smoke.
I even tried to look like you,
overdone dolly at fifty-two,
unzipped my blouse, my heart, my bruises
to every man who confused my sobs with moans.
I was once told, God watches over whores too,
fills their backyards with seeds,
grows beets
into the pavement cracks of their skin.
I must have been fourteen
when the sky sound-proofed itself.
I had to pummel a partition glass every time I prayed.
God can be funny, sometimes. Wouldn’t you say? —
O Mother, how could've I escaped it?

Every woman I knew ate her heart to the rind
and spewed the men
like mildew.
I must have been fourteen
when the beets crushed between my legs
and the spite rushed in like a waft of pollen.
I think I secretly pitied you, then,
sad and swollen,
regurgitating your sins
for your children.
I even tried to look like you,
groomed and doomed at fifty-two.
With your dolled-up sorrow
and rouged heart,
I could never see you.
I will never see you —
26
God, I was told, looks after whores,
how did he miss you?
Mary of Sorrows
Something is starting in my belly,

a Christ, small and silly,
scuffing its rosy heels
on my paving stone.
How did it get here?
And when?
I am a woman of thirty;
miracles no longer interest me.
I climb stirrups as I would a scaffold.
I know exactly where the head should go,
the arms,
the knees,
the eyes especially.
I unpack,
placid and uncomplicated,
while God's scalpels dismember me
without a scar.
I never asked to be woman,

never asked for this heart,
this mash of blood and woe.
A sort of a monkish existence I lead,
but without the unselfish faith of it.
All mothers are bored Buddhas,
whiling away the hours
from their lotus thrones.
Most days, I forget I'm thirty.

I forget I, too,
once hang upside down
from that basic cross
where agony
outdid me.
I, an incognito Messiah,
have died many times,
each time quickened
by God's mouth-to-mouth.
27
Out of my cabinet poke the evening pills,
vacant-eyed Sirens,
asking nothing;
a kiss,
some sleep
for my thirty years
of wants and wants.
Something in my belly is swelling and yelling,

a sort of unstopped knell.
A siesta,
a siesta for the soul,
at last!
I climb the rungs of my fate as I would stirrups.
I know exactly where the head should go,
the arms,
the knees,
the eyes especially.
I let my heart slip off like a shift dress
and become simple again
while the gauzy hands of God rearrange me
without touching.
28
Teaching my Daughter about Death
Dear daughter,
I cannot have you.
I cannot have you

under these tarred skies
where prayers travel in motorcades,
countless,
but empty,
empty.
Your heart is a tabula rasa,
unmarked by such despair,
such hunger.
Most days, you will make a habit out of suicide.
Life makes a such a good case for death
you wouldn't need to ask how or why.
Most days, the body is a clock running backward,
waiting to be unborn.
So, don’t be silly now
and beg me to have you
in this world where breath
stinks of funeral pyre.
Long ago, I wanted life too.
Now, I breathe behind a cellophane-wrapped face;
even the air is suicidal.
So darling, I shall not have you
behind this cerement womb,
this winding-sheet of biology
where water rotates
alongside
death.
“Sabah” — I would've named you

because that's what a woman looks for her entire life,
because to a woman, the night is never lifted.
And so, you shall never come, my beloved child, to this world
where I sit with the urgency of a suicide note on a desktop,
wanting nothing more than to be done with.
29
Abortion
I wasn’t ready.
You were nailed to me by mere chance,
a tiny crucifix.
Even then,
we shared so much more than a body.
We bleed from habit, you could say.
Motherhood,
that lethal spider,
has spun webs around my heart
and bit into my womb,
starting a rash as serious as death.
I tried not to stare.
I tried not to overthink,
but your face was there,
on the screen,
a rough sketch,
an unfinished portrait.
The doctor scrawled
numbers,
figures,
dates.
I was so important
statistics had to be made
in my honour.
Motherhood is a calculated business.
Motherhood is so big and heavy
I had to sew it on with string.
The nurses had agreed on a certain faceless kindness.

“Sugar” and “Pancake”
they would call me,
but what was sweet about murder?
What detergent could wash the sin clean?
For months,
I was thick with Band-Aids and blood,
a chunk of beef
in tin foil.
I could not move.
I could not speak.
I lay flat on my white platter,
ready to be dished out to the nurses.
30
For months, eyes,
penetrating as X-rays,
cut through my body,
my soul,
my brain.
In small amounts, I gave myself out
to hospital beds,
to forms and papers,
to gossip and sutures.
On the last day, maggots started growing

out of my skin.
“Can death be rinsed off as well?”
I wondered —
Hour by hour, I studied your sketch.
The elaborateness of something so simple
outdid me;
two jellyfish in the centre
lacing up their tentacles around me,
pulling me into their viscous existence
and a pink urchin,
groping for the bulbous chest,
leaving red clumps with each kiss.
“It’s time my cookie, are you ready?”

I was escorted to that selfish room
where I got to play God for a moment,
where I got to look down on you
with unblinking eyes
and outstare you.
31
32
Dada’s Eyes
I sit with my heart inside my jaw.

An “I love you” throbs down my throat.
I try to spell out the three-worded,
eight-lettered sentence
but I have a jagged alphabet
and a scarred tongue.
The letters come out as broken glass
and blood clots,
and the “I love you” starts to sound more
like a cry for help.
I stuck a finger down my mouth
and start gagging on the past.
I gag on twenty years of
salted lips and
twisted tongues.
For twenty years,

Dada hammered tacks into my heart,
strung barbwire around my belly.
For twenty years,
Dada lathered my eyes with soap
for staring too long at boys,
rubbed my lips with coarse salt
for talking too much to boys.
For twenty years,
Dada surrounded my life
with a picket-fence
of “halal” and “haram,”
brewed his afternoon tea
on the fire of my anger.
For twenty years,
I tucked fear into my mattress
like buckwheat stuffing,
tailored my dress hems,
my words,
my feelings
to dada’s fit.
For twenty years,
Dada dipped his toes into my poetry,
rapped his knuckles on my heart.
This is how
my heartbeat was tuned to fury,
33
my poems clenched into fists.
For twenty years, I believed that
women were shaped into scandals,
that the inside of my thighs
was the Devil’s habitat.
I wore charms and talismans
underneath my skirts,
powdered my lips with prayers
to ward off evil.
It was difficult teaching this to my body:
My virginity reads like a résumé,
the crack between my thighs like an ID.
« ‫» أعوذ باهلل من الشيطان الرجيم‬

For undoing the zip of my womanhood,
for smudging my scars
with lipstick and rouge.

For trimming my heart too short,
for showing too much cleavage
in my poetry.

For not understanding the difference
between my body
and a display-stand,
for hosting wine tastings
between my legs.
You cannot love me, Ahmad —

You cannot love a woman
who is made of soil, water and chaos,
who is left with an aftertaste of salt and blood
every time she tries to spell love.
Ahmad,
you cannot love a woman
who nips the crumbs of her own heart
between her gums,
who cuts herself into strips of bandage
to soak up her pain.
You cannot love a woman
who carries her Dada's eyes
everywhere she goes
34
like contact lenses
and gets confused when she hears the word “love”
because all she can hear is “sin.”
What is love like, Ahmad?

Is it anything like my father?
Does it hide behind a beard
and stink of wood and musk?
And when it barges into my body,
will it say “Bismillah”
before tearing my thighs open?
Or is love more like you, Ahmad?
Does it have your shaved chin
and smell of cologne and lotion?
And when it visits my body,
will it recite Bukowski and Neruda
over my parted legs
and skim off my mouth
the twenty-year crust of shame?
How can I learn to love, Ahmad,

when I'm still un-learning
a lifetime of self-hatred?
How can I pronounce love correctly
when I still read “woman” like a misspelling?
How can I say “I love you”
without the letters twisting inside my mouth
and my tongue getting tangled into a thousand knots
so that what I finally pronounce
is my own father's name?
35
A Conversation
How to explain to you?
I was nineteen
when I met Nabil.
I had met other men
and known the 2 a.m. longing
that leaves you gagging
on a mouthful of memories.
I had known the 4 a.m. flashbacks
that peel the dermis
off your heart
like tapered fingernails.
You see what I mean,

don’t you?
I had sat for the “We're not fit

for each other” meals
that reek
of stale promises.
I had worn love
like a thumbprint,
recorded first kisses
and butterflies-in-the-stomach
on my birth certificate.
I was nineteen
when I first discovered Nabil
was nothing like
the men I penned
into poems.
You understand the difficulty now.
I was twenty-one
when I made love to Nabil.
What happened before that?

But you must promise not to tell.
I had known other men,

allowed other men
to bask in the shade
36
of my bosom,
allowed other men
to stub out their desires
into the ashtray
of my body,
allowed other men
to make the drunk 6 a.m.
“I need you” call
and wake up the next morning
to forget they needed me
the night before.
I had known love,
montaged kisses into silent films,
listened to touches
like a-cappella songs,
taken anniversary photographs
like mugshots.
Oh, wait a minute!

There’s something else…
I was twenty-one
when I started
cutting the language in two:
One for Nabil
and one
for all the other men
I knew.
Did I just make this up?

But who’s to say?
I am twenty-five now.
My chest is no longer clothed
in sunrays
and my heart is fetid
with old tobacco smoke.
I spend most nights
praying my next birth
would be on someone else’s lips,
praying my next birth
would not take on the aftertaste
of bourbon and menthol cigarettes.
What is there to say
37
about whisky love
except that it ends
as soon as hangover starts?
Wait for it, there’s more...
I am twenty-five now.
I soften his leftover heart
between my gums
because women like me
are cursed to digest
their worst mistakes.
And then what?
My poems are
the forceps I use
to remove the nails
clawing at my memory.
I am just starting to realize
the next best thing to love
is the poetry
about it.
Here’s what I’ve been teaching
my heart lately (in vain):
Love that comes
with emergency-exits
and no front-doors
is not worth holding on to.
From now on,
no more ‘running away from.’
Only ‘walking to.’
Oh, and one last thing…
I was twenty-five
when I finally
stopped
cutting the language
in half.
Your turn now!

I’m listening…
38
Woman Enough
When Halima had her first child,

she was still wearing her hair in braids,
her heart in tulle and ruffles.
On her wedding day,
she had her skin
plucked,
scrubbed
and embroidered
with barbwire and hemp rope.
Her braids were chopped
and her hair gathered into a bun
on which her whole marriage
was balanced.
Her aunts brought wads
and wads of cotton
and puffed
her body
into a beanbag.
Even with all that added weight,
Halima still felt everything
but whole.
A woman had to be
overblown,
overstuffed,
overmade —
To be “under”
was to cease to be woman.
No woman was
woman enough
for a hungry man —
Things Halima's mother and aunts
would never dare
tell her.
Only in bed did Halima see

her husband's face
for the first time.
Before that, he was a name
the whole village
repeated
like a national anthem.
39
His hands on her neck
blunt machetes,
his tongue between her thighs
a piercing-gun.
But instead of the bedsheets,
it was her heart
that was hennaed with blood.
No one knows red
as intimately
as a woman.
And nothing dresses in red
as beautifully
as a scarred heart.
This was not the first time

Halima had traffic inside
her body:
Her father,
her uncle,
the neighbours’ boys.
Halima wore a helmet to love.
Halima realized
the worst accidents
happened in bed.
“Poor, poor Mustafa.

Can you believe how much he's suffered?”
Everyone in the neighbourhood
believed Mustafa was a victim
of ill luck
and rushed decisions.
No one understood
that he, at any rate,
was lucky enough
to take decisions.
Throughout their marriage,
Mustafa tied the truth
like a noose
around Halima's throat.
To try and speak it
was a death-wish.
40
Halima is almost thirty now,
almost beautiful
almost woman.
Her braids have grown back
to full length.
Only this time,
she has decided,
they would sit tight
against the one spot
Mustafa assumed
would remain
untouched.
41
Windfalls in Summer
There is no way to make this story pleasant.
The first time it happened

was midsummer.
Salma’s uncle
was a grey mishap,
a fifty-year-old mass
of hair and whiskey.
His vices followed him around
like a whiff of cheap smoke.
His body was
a sack full of sin,
a heady brew of violence
and lust.
I hate to tell you this story, but…
Salma remembers
the electric drill
boring through fresh cement,
her uncle’s hands
speckled with slurry,
her uncle’s hands
that kept turning into mauls
and hammering wedges
into her bones
to fix her to guilt forever.
She remembers a flurry
of dust and grit
pattering on her face,
a bathtub full of soap, water
and floating debris.
She remembers
the screech of drills
singing her to sleep,
her heart hardening
into concrete.
I want to tell you this story without having

to say what I’m about to say.
42
Salma remembers
her mother with
a bucket of boiling water
that would scald her lips
on another man’s wants.
Salma cannot run her fingers
over her mouth
without burning herself,
cannot open her eyes
without rubbing off
the build-up of grit.
Salma would spend

the next 18 months
unhooking photographs
of summer 1993
from her eyelids,
tweezing mats of hair
from her memory,
plucking stained teeth
from her heart.
I would’ve felt guilty

if I hadn’t confessed to you.
Salma would spend

the rest of her life
confusing uncle and mother,
confusing axe and tree,
confusing storm and windfall,
because, to her body,
abuser and abused
would always mean
the same person.
I never wanted the story to end this way,

but it did.
It must.
43
Sacrifice
My body
a white crucifix
nailed to the bed,
a small prayer book,
lettered in honeydew
and bound in tulle.
Someone kneels to read,
clutching my fingers
like rosary beads.
Ink is shed
as the book rips
at the seams,
the spine too supple
to shoulder man’s needs.
My girlhood,
robed in scarlet,
hangs from the beam,
skinned and gutted
by plain greed.
Prayers and squeals
peal in sync,
splitting the earth,
the Heavens
and the space in between.
My body,
clad in moonlight
and the pall
of the bedsheets.
I tote a death-knell
between my legs
that only men can hear
tolling at thirteen.
A lychgate opens in my chest
at which a man is humming
the requiem of my heartbeat,
drawing a hearse heaped
with the carrion of my girlhood.
On the altar of his lust,
my thirteen years
are spilled
while his manhood chimes
44
the hour of my defeat,
but I have a spine
solid as a headstone
and hands
that can sew a gown
out of a winding-sheet.
Life lurks behind the cross

like a well that welters
below the concrete
or a sail that refuses
the trammels
of rope and cleat.
45
Waiting for his Rain
Aisha, you are too reckless,

frightening in the way
you let smoking men
into your straw heart.
Your arms are stretched far too high.
Your mouth is far too open.
And men do not always come as rain,
nor do women as burning houses.
Remember Aisha,
women do not always come dressed
as first-aid kits
nor do men as third-degree burns.
Aisha, there is, in you,

fire enough to burn yourself,
water enough to put the fire out.
Remember,
it is easy to confuse
floods with rainwater
when one is thirsty.
“But Samir dug for old coins

and soda lids
inside my mouth
and it did not feel like drowning.
Anwar greased my heart
with coconut oil
and it did not feel like drowning.
Hadi lived for two months straight
under my jersey shirt
and it did not feel like drowning.”
Aisha, no love could ever fit

the size of your wanting.
I can’t imagine your heart
as anything but an asymptote
yearning for touching.
But remember Aisha,
no matter how many times
the sea waves sweep the shoreline away,
the shoreline will always think
they were kissing.
46
“But you can only love
as much as you are willing
to die
for the wrong cause.
Surely, there are better reasons
than love to die for,
but if death must come,
at least, let it prove to me
it was worth all the poetry.
If love must take the form
of a shipwreck,
then my heart refuses to take
swimming lessons.
Only a drowning girl
can exhale the salt-breath
of this poem
and make it look
more beautiful than tragic.”
47
Pathology of Love
I've done it again —

Served my heart
to a salivating host,
chewing it
with toothless gums.
Now they want more,
gaped mouths and
greasy thumbs.
They want to fit me
into their chin cleft,
crumple me
inside their pockets,
tamp my heart
into their tobacco pipes.
Little do they know —
How I grow and grow
in small spaces
like some ominous totem
or wrathful god.
Choking on my love,
they spit me
out,
out
of their sticky hearts.
Thick love,
heavy love.
Does my enormity
scare them?
Fat, fat soul,
bloated with pain,
all sides leaking
with poetry —
I'm frightening in the way
I love,
in the way I wear myself
so nakedly,
revealing too much heart,
flashing too much soul.
These men will only settle
for thin love,
diet love.
Does my unselfing
48
worry them?
It seems I've done it again —

Broke myself down
like change for a 20,
shrunk to a paperweight,
coiled inside some man's
breast-pocket.
Now that I'm all small
and weightless,
he loves me,
I'm his special,
little
nobody.
Skeleton soul,
skinny heart,
he finally settles for me.
Little does he know —
How I fill and fill
the vacancy of a man's heart
until it's swollen
with me.
49
The Night Visitor
My only friend visits by night,

his frock ballooning out
in a sweep of black gossamer.
The freckles on his face
are crushed nacre,
a spill of pearlescent powder
and his hair a spume of silver.
I pillow my head on his chest,
soft and downy as plush.
My Madonna heart bellies out
with ache
and he holds an index to it
and murmurs “Hush.”
On the bed,
that woodwork bosom,
I curl up into a crumple of grief
and die at intervals;
I keep busy as such,
the day-to-day pastime.
Dying, after all, is a matter of custom.
My friend talks so little
but listens well and well
as his body arches over me
like a gemmed vault or a great bell.
We are not lovers.
We secretly wed by night
and separate by dawn.
Closer and closer
we nestle together
and nuzzle each other's sorrows
under the starry arbour of his face,
until the Sun, unruly as she is,
decrees the dreadful divorce.
“Dear Mr. Dark,” I summon him

and he gushes forth and forth.
50
Cheers to Death
Come and unbutton

my blouse,
my soul,
the confusion of being misunderstood
even at twenty-two.
Come with your well-versed hands,
your martini-soaked heart
and your fifty years of woe.
For eighteen months,
my heart reclined in its crib of bones,
comatose
and blue.
I've tried potions,
poems,
psalms,
hired surgeons of the soul
and majors in voodoo —
Nothing can perform patchwork
on your life
like a lover's hands can do.
I've no skill,
since you ask,
no genius of that kind.
The body to me is a conundrum
as the universe is to a Hindu.
And yet, our bodies clasped,
at their first encounter,
like it's a déja-vu.
But beware my love,
for nothingness often comes dressed
as a woman,
for I am the deceased I must mourn
and bid adieu.
Isn’t it true
only a woman knows
how to cast herself
in fire and sinew?
Isn’t it true
death always comes after our bodies
in the form of love?
And God knows I can never get enough
of dying.
51
Here’s a wish:
I hope someone kills you enough
through the night
to keep life away from you.
So, while we're celebrating, my dear,
please do spare a glass for death
or even a few.
Death is
in the bones,
in the bed,
in the beer.
Love-making is a threesome.
If you've made love with one person,
you've made it with two.
You see, my love,
I can please.
I can cheer.
I can excite even the dead
out of their tombs.
As for eternity,
I've lost her to a dare.
I dared her to mark my name,
but instead, she scratched her brow
and exclaimed:
“Again, W-H-O?!”
52
My Lover’s Wife
Watch her plodding

through years of waiting,
heavy with lipstick and sorrow,
rummaging around in her heart
for forgiveness.
She is your wife.
She holds her heart

like a handkerchief to your face
and wipes the soot of years away.
With her cotton-wool hands,
she swabs the lesions on your soul.
And you crane forward
and lap up her saucerful
of kisses.
She is your wife.
Watch her wading

the dank ditches of middle-age,
waiting,
waiting,
ribs padded with fleece,
bones fanned out
into a bedspread for you.
Breath to breath,
you claim her with your tongue,
your colony of heartbeat
and flesh.
She is more than a wife, my darling.
Notice how she softens into water

as your six-feet-tall dinghy
rolls and rolls in her tide,
deck awash.
Notice how your tongue
berths at her chest,
and how the words swoon at your lips,
giddy and sea-sick.
53
She is not the bitter woman you left,
the woman who made you flail about
in her eddies of rage.
She is all smoothed out now,
all used-up for you,
stitching her scars together
like Durham quilt,
unpinning the puckered hems
of her heart.
The ferry of fifteen years unloads
while she waits and waits
at the quay of your promises.
But what are promises

but premature apologies,
an ahead-of-the-schedule
“I’m sorry I hurt you the way I did,
the way I always will?”
She is no longer your wife, my dearest.
In the beginning, there was silence

and in the end, there will be too,
but the lies we choose
to live off
make such noise in the room,
the way static on the phone-line
keeps us distracted
when there is no one,
on the other end, to talk to.
Once, she taught you
the grammar of wanting.
Now, you teach her
the alphabet of waiting.
And you have all the right to, for
you can only want so much
that you can want
no more.
54
Ready, Set, Love!
Mama says my love is too thick

and thick love
clogs up man’s heart.
She says men prefer lukewarm love,
room-temperature women
with 25° C hearts.
She says love tastes best chambré.
She says I should be careful with love,
that women have a tendency of
playing Russian roulette
with their hearts,
that men have a way of
creating murder-scenes
with blank cartridge
and empty barrels.
Mama says I have the kind of body
that sheds dead skin and splinters,
the kind of hands
that burn sandalwood and napalm,
the kind of mouth
that bites into boundaries.
Mama says loving cannot do me good,
that my heart looks like a shooting-range,
men like loaded pistols,
that I am splattered with the carcasses
of all I once loved.
Mama says I love the wrong way,
that I kiss with my heart first,
with my lips second.
She says I shouldn’t allow myself
to kiss the edge of a mirror
inside a man’s mouth.
Mama is scared for me.
She says I talk to men the wrong way,
that love is my native language,
Arabic my second.
Mama says my body speaks love so fluently
men will want to hear its different accents.
She says men are good at pulling death penalties
out of their jeans
and breaking the dainty zipper that runs the length
between my hips.
55
She reminds me my tongue is not a honeycomb,
my chest not a sugarcane field,
my feelings not raw dough.
Mama says men will not always
know the difference
between me
and a buffet-reception,
that they will drop by uninvited,
that they will ask for free sampling.
Mama says if I want the light
to break through my panes,
I must let it
break me first.
Mama knows about us,
knows how I lived inside your heart on credit,
housed your body on rent,
like neither of us could afford
the price-tag
attached to love.
Mama knows I loved you
like there was nothing more poetic
than collateral damage,
like there was not enough wreckage
in the world
already.
Mama knows how our hearts chafed together
like the boughs of a tree
that ached to be fondled by fire.
Mama knows I’ve got used to kissing stingers,
sharing my bed with artillery.
Mama knows loving you was an act of hospitality
towards everything I would eventually die of.
I remember it hurt,
the first time my heartbeat synchronised
with gunshot,
the first time I shaved glass shards
from my skin,
the first time you showed me
how to recycle my severed parts
into poetry,
the first time I realized
my poems were matchsticks
and I
am addicted to the smell of burning.
56
Or, put more accurately:
This is how long it takes from heartbreak
to feel safe in a silo.
All I know is bearing a heart like mine
can only be an act of faith.
I remember mama telling me:
“Azizati, I know you are angry
and ready to break things
but please,
do not be one of them.”
But mama, isn’t this what poets are best at;

living off their shatterings,
ink culled from disappointments,
always wondering how much breaking
they have to suffer
before God could speak through them.
Mama, I dare you to look at this poetry
and tell me this much hellfire
was not worth the burning,
and tell me this much death
was not worth the wait!
57
Apology to my Lover
Forgive me,
I was only taught to love this way,
mama's way,
nana's way,
in large handfuls,
in open fists,
in overdoses.
See, we make a habit out of breaking.
We break so well
like our hearts have rehearsed it
long before it happens,
like our bones are wrought into crutches
shortly after it happens.
Perhaps, it's the way we break;

with so much grace,
softly,
quietly,
hearts trimmed with lace,
hearts marinated in olive oil,
hearts fastened with clothespins
because they keep falling out of place.
Perhaps, I am love that happens
to be misspoken
like a sonnet that blurts out
thunderstorms
by accident.
It will take you some time

before you understand
I am the kind of woman
who pulls heaven from one hand,
hell from the other,
the kind of woman
who sutures her wounds with satin,
stanches her bleeds
with swathes of poetry.
It will take you some time
before you realize
I bear the kind of legs
that master pirouettes
in the middle of tragedy.
58
When you learn to dance barefoot
over your own splinters,
nothing hurts you anymore.
Sometimes, I wish I could tell you this

in simpler terms.
I wish my words could smell
less like charred skin,
more like woodfire
and frankincense.
I wish more people knew
how easy it is to mistake pain for poetry.
And sometimes, I wish I could love you less,
one piece at a time,
one disaster at a time,
rearranging my life between heartbreaks.
The day I fell in love,

my heart was tied around my tongue into knots.
This is why I can only speak in metaphors,
love in metaphors,
break in metaphors.
I practiced vagueness for so long
I can no longer say “I love you”
without adding:
“Each of your kisses left a bullet-hole
no amount of poetry
could ever fill.”
or
“I still gargle rosewater
because all I can taste
ever since I called your name
is gunpowder.”
or
“I will continue to
unfold my chest into a mattress for you,
my spine into a bedspread
until I can find
an easier way
to love you,
until your skin tastes
less of the tang
of disappointment.”
59
I want you to know
this is the only way I can love you,
mama's way,
nana's way,
the kind of love that confuses
bullet-chips with rose petals,
revolvers with poems,
disasters with well-spoken men,
the kind of love
where my heart is a search-party
sent in all the wrong places,
accidentally
straying into a warzone.
I want you to know

this is the only way I will kiss you
like your lips are the only ceasefire
that can interrupt my hell.
This is the only way I will make love to you,
balancing a mirror
between my legs
so that you take a better look
at everything
that has ever hurt me.
I want you to know

I am standing erect
through the breaking,
feet adorned with blood and glass,
poems tinkling to the floor
in a cascade of red.
I am solo-dancing at gun-point,
swaying to the sonata
of bullets,
tender and uncontrollable,
understanding ‘giving’
only as ‘over-giving,’
my heart a wildflower
that chose,
out of all places,
to grow
inside
the barrel
of a rifle.
60
The Saddest Story
(Inspired by Sabah Khodir)
In this story,
I do not chew my heart
between my teeth
because I feed
on everything that hurts me.
I do not spill darkness and poetry
on every ground I tread on.
In this story,
it is not a tradition
for women in my family
to handle abuse like love,
to bring the anger of years as dowry.
In this story,
the woman falls in love
without learning
the weather forecast
on the atlas of her body.
The woman falls in love
without familiarising
with the shape of a storm
in her looking-glass.
The woman knows
how to be something other than
a well-put-together
catastrophe.
In this story,
the man is not a collector;
he does not hoard broken hearts
like antiques.
The man is not a gatekeeper;
he does not guard the portcullis
of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
This is a different story:

I do not develop a habit
of grinding my heart into poetry
at 3 in the morning
or
61
brewing poems
that dada finds hard
to stomach.
In this story,
dada does not force soap in my mouth
hoping that the Devil might come off
like a stain.
His sandpaper hands are tired
of rubbing off sin after sin
from my body.
For the last time, this is a different story:

I do not wear a life-jacket to sleep
because I keep having dreams
of drowning.
I do not double back my heart
as a footnote
to every love story.
I do not rinse my mouth
with cider and sea-salt
every time a man kisses me
because the worst thing
a mouth can taste is
sweetness.
In this story,
no one asks why I steep
my heart in gasoline
after the man leaves,
or
why I sugar-coat my anger
for the man who says I'm too aggressive
for his taste.
No one wonders
why dada massages my scalp
with prayers
or
why he anoints me in Surah Al-Baqarah
the day he learns about my lover.
This story ends differently:

I huddle under other men's bower,
disappear inside other men's mouths
62
only to get a hint
of what loneliness tastes like
outside my body.
This is probably
the saddest story
you will ever hear
because most days,
I still chew my heart between my teeth.
Most days,
I still have a hard time choosing
between the bed men who gave me life
and the good men who took it away from me.
And most days,
hurting myself
is my only excuse
for writing
good
p
o
e
t
r
y
.
63
Remembering the Givens
64
I forgot how to be woman.
It's been eleven years

since I washed the past from my skin.
Eleven years
since I combed the memories away
from my hair.
I hide from mirrors
as from police cabs.
I don't think I could've survived
something as precarious
as woman.
Perhaps, woman is only a pit-stop
for the next journey.
Perhaps, woman is the wrong word
for what I am today.
I may have walked into this body a woman,
but I am walking out if it a war
and without war,
woman would stop making sense.
I am a woman of colour.
All shades wash out against my skin.
I am the daughter of two refugees.
I was born at the intersection
of violence with fear.
The only home I've had was my body
and even that
hasn't always felt like mine:
The surgeons,
the midwives,
the assaulters
have changed the skin on me
more than I've changed clothes.
But home always finds its way back into your body,
doesn’t it?
Doesn’t home always find a way to leach out of your skin,
colour of air,
taste of antifreeze?
Doesn’t home teach you how to pose for death
and shouts “Say c-h-e-e-s-e!”?
I think about all the times
65
I had to rinse my body with forgetfulness,
lather my memory with Clorox,
wring the past out of it.
I think about all the times
I had to wear my skin loose
to fit other people inside,
all the times
I had to build storage compartments
into my body
to stow the water,
the milk,
the ache,
the tenderness that comes
with the ache,
and how lately, I have been a little short
of my body.
To understand loss, you must start your day
by shovelling the casualties
out of your skin at 6.45
and run off to make coffee at 7.30.
To understand despair, you must listen to your heart
like a prayer
that will never be answered.
No one teaches you

your body is a boarding-house,
your heart a parking-meter,
that you must pay dearly
for what is already yours.
No one teaches you
your ribcage is an exile,
your legs borders of an occupied state,
that there is no way to reclaim
your voice
except sing along to bombing raids.
For so long, I could not understand
how touching your own skin
could feel like bumping into strangers,
how you could be breaking into someone else’s home
by entering yours.
As I'm calculating the miracles on my skin,

I reach out for the mirror
and blush —
66
How did this body
outmeasure the breadth of tragedy?
Woman. That's how.
67
Wallflowers Are Black
I am not the same woman you left.

That woman was
chinaware,
pottery-work.
I have nothing to do with things that break.
My mother gave birth
to a huddle of land and flesh
instead of a daughter.
I have soil clotting beneath my skin,
saltwater wrinkling my memory.
Doesn’t it astonish you that even my heart
is just an anagram
of earth?
My mouth is piled with the jetsam of my Arabic.
I am only fluent in brokenness.
I spin my tongue like a sling
around my dislocated language,
the strained“Alhamdulillah,”
the sprained “Saha,”
the fractured “Assalamu-Alaikum.”
Instead, I bedizen my mouth
with the borrowed finery of English;
the synthetic “I’m OK, thanks,”
the scantily-clad “You’re welcome,”
the gaudy “Hey there!”
English sprawls bottomless on my ridge,
the syllables squirm with shame.
You say the word and suddenly
it takes up three-quarters of your jaw,
You say the word and suddenly
you belong to it,
like an arranged marriage to a language
you agree to love
but never get to know.
What else is there to say about this language
except it is target practice for the tongue?
Anything is yours
if it breaks you,
or you break it,
or allow the crossfire to break you both.
68
That woman was decked out in her skimpy English,
her tongue swishing the sheer silks of Cockney.
Perhaps, home is just another way of saying “I’m sorry,”
“Ana assif,”
and I am running out of ways to forgive it.
In my mouth, home is just as loud as a curse-word
and just as improper.
This is, I assume, the price we pay for kissing wars goodnight,
for waking up next to past traumas
curled up on our favourite side
of the bed.
Home will teach you a thousand way to die
and none to live.
Now, would you believe me if I said
an anthem could easily pass for a suicide-note?
This whole body is freckled with cremains,

gnarled with history.
I traced out the route back home
on the map of my veins.
That woman wore her veins like embossed florals,
her body too dainty
to pack on the extra pounds of a country.
I have nothing to do with things that
do not expand into waves or storm clouds.
You should know by now
I am, in all equations, a miscalculation,
in all subjects, a taboo,
my skin a peeled apple
left out in the open air,
my hair a neglected garden,
my name a sigh.
That woman you left did not have
shame for skin,
anger for hair,
a dirge for a name.
do not make a revolution out of me.
Just by the colour of my skin,
I can start riots,
wars,
massacres.
69
That other woman had skin so bland
it couldn't even start
a fist-fight.

That woman sold love to passers-by.
I sold my legs
and crawled to a country
that would let me do anything
except stand on my feet.
Long before I learnt I was a loaded rifle,
live ammunition,
this country had her index
on the trigger.
When I starved,
I munched the rubble
from home.
When I had nowhere to sleep,
I couched my body;
the only place on the world-map
that's never banished me.
When people ask me what I do for a living, I say:
“I survive.
I rehearsed life long before I could live.”
For almost nine months,
I was my father's punchbag.
He practiced night and day,
night and day.
When my mother birthed me,
I had more thumps than flesh,
more dents than bone.
It is no wonder
a man with a clenched fist in my face
is still my last worry.
It is no wonder
I fist-bump tragedy,
greet death with a high-five.
This suicide practice,
this exercise in asphyxiation:
Your rites of passage into a land
that has no interest in you
except dead.
That woman you left
cried every time she broke a nail
70
or lost a few hair strands.
I've lost everything that
never grows back —
My mother,
my husband and four children,
my mind.
can be recovered.
The only reason I've never let a cry out
is that I had no other choice
but to turn into one.

That woman died long before
you parted with her.
I am too much land,
too much water
to know anything about death.
I have my mother's pain in my cells
and my father's fists to fight it away.
I have nothing to do with the woman you left.
My darkness tells a story
her white skin
can never write,
and inside my body,
I store the last crumbs of home.
You should know by now
we sucked red milk from our mothers' breasts,
shaved off our dreams
long before we were old enough to grow them,
festooned our homes with corpses
and the detritus of war,
bartered our darkness,
thickness,
heaviness
for a language that sits on the tongue
like a chalk-stone —
To break it
was the only way we could speak it.
Even when life tried to stunt us,
we stretched like plants on a wall.
At least, when they wilt away,
they will still be
vertical.
71
How to Know a Miracle by its Colour
They ask you to use hotwash

on your body
to remove the dirt
that is your colour.
Before that, you didn't understand
how black you are:
Your bones,
your blood,
your heart,
sheening with the bitumen
of all the roads you kissed goodbye.
But black is not a reversible jacket.
You cannot flip it inside out
and expect white on the lining.
Black is not watercolour,
not sea salt,
not corn-starch.
Do not expect it to wash away,
to dissolve,
to blend into other ingredients.
Black is the oil floating on water.
I am the oil floating on water.
I am more bodies
than I can count,
more soil
that's in any continent.
To reach my own body,
I have to travel miles,
cross borders,
traverse the red, red river
that is black history.
I know this
because when we left our mothers' wombs,
the world was just as red.
I know this
because when we had children of our own,
we taught them that black was the only colour
that went with red.
Red milk,
red honey,
red water —
Some of the staples of a black pantry.
72
With time, we learnt to cook with these,
stomach these,
feed our children these.
We wore helmets to bed,
lifejackets on land
but when we hit the water,
the only thing we had on our skin
was Black —
If Black isn't the kind of miracle

you've been praying your whole life
to happen,
I don't know what else is.
73
The Cost of Coping
You tried coping,

didn't you?
Left your skin hanging
from the rack
and walked out of the house
dressed
in another,
propped up your tongue
with idle chat
and honeyed words,
trained it to do lunges,
stretches,
to weightlift
a language much heavier
than its own.
The first time

you were tongue-kissed,
you scrubbed your tongue
so hard
the letters came off
like wallpaper chippings.
You were always told
foreignness was a feeling
but foreignness left
a residue in the mouth,
so familiar now
to your taste-buds,
all you had to do
was swallow
your own slaver.
The second time

you were tongue-kissed,
an aftertaste of blood
and gunpowder
clang to the roof
of your mouth.
You felt like tearing
your jaw open,
like plucking your tongue
and braising it
74
in hot oil.
And somehow,
you were reminded
what people call teeth
are the unmarked tombstones
embedded in your jawbone.
No amount of floss could rub
the plaque of sin
clean.
Nobody will know —
you thought to yourself —
you kissed a man
with a tongue that unfurled
into a revolver
and a name that sounded
like a hail of bullets.
Nobody will know
your mouth was
the second land
on the world-map
your ancestry
was shot dead.
You tried pleasing,

didn't you?
Unfolded yourself
over bedsheets
that contrasted
with your black.
“Night against day,”
he muttered
with a slanted grin
and stepped deep inside
your infinite,
infinite
darkness,
your heart creasing
between his palms
like a dried flower
between the pages
of a book.
“Didn't you hear 'bout
the latest trends?”
And you went on
75
to scoff with complicity,
“Black is the new colour
of purity.”
As you soaped your body

at the end of that day,
it smelled of years
of running under
moonless night skies
and surviving
on artificial lighting.
Nobody will notice —
you thought to yourself —
the smell of burnt
wire filament
and burnt lightbulbs
on your body.
You tried hiding,

didn't you?
And when someone
did notice the graveyard
inside your mouth
and the spirals of smoke
wafting from your skin,
you rolled your body
into a palm-size lump
and swallowed
yourself
whole.
76
A Geographical Malfunction
My skin brought me here.

Every molecule of my body
is rubbed with home.
I smell like the kind of thickness
no perfume can soften.
When I first came here, I didn't know what home meant
until someone called me “another bitch from Africa.”
I learnt home from the mouth of a stranger.
I picked the words like a compliment I couldn't stop singing to myself.
“Africa bitch”
“Africa bitch”
“Africa bitch”
The end of my tongue was sliced off
when my father overheard me.
I hated my father
for being the reason behind my lisp
and I hated home
for breeding men like my father.
For years, I struggled to pronounce Africa properly.

I would choke on the second letter
and never be able to finish —
“Afff”
“Afff”
“Afff”
For a while, home stopped sounding like a compliment.
It started to sound like I suffered from breathing issues,
like I've just run a long distance
and was panting for air.
In my geography class,
we learnt that the equator cuts nearly halfway through Africa.
Even on the map, Africa was scarred.
Home was like the first time a girl discovered blood between her legs.
Home meant we had to bleed
without understanding why.
A few years later, home would begin to mean something different.

It meant dollops and dollops of
hair-bleach,
Garnier,
Nivea,
canned white DNA.
77
It meant everything I had to do
so that I looked less like myself,
less like my mother,
less like a biological scandal,
and “less” isn't something
we know how to pull off.
“Less” is exactly the type of thing home teaches us
not to become.
When people ask me where I come from,

I remain silent.
I'd rather have the rest of my tongue plucked out
than say it —
Home is a machine-gun pointed at my chest.
When I think about Africa,
I see fathers with spears for arms,
daughters with cornstalks for tongues.
I see redness gushing forth in waves,
flecked with white foam —
When I think about Africa,
I fail to see a single black thing.
The last time someone called me an African bitch,
I didn't sing along.
I didn't even flinch at the insult.
All I did was gasp in shock
at how black Africa must look to outsiders.
My skin may have brought me here,

but it's this country's ignorance that will take me back.
78
Adah’s Anger
1. “Adah, your breasts are protruding,”

my mother strung the words like an alarm.
I had just turned twelve
and already growing into something shameful.
Mama said when the first spurts of water spring from the earth,
the man will come with drills and bore wells.
2. “Show me your breasts,” Ghedi asked me,

sniffing at my skin for water,
but when sand grains crackled between his teeth,
he never asked again.
3. After thirty minutes of resistance,

I black out
to wake up less myself,
to wake up more anger.
It was dawn.
My mother dragged me to the kitchen,
my body trailing behind her in a streak of cries.
And then,
it's hot coals
and my mother's flushed fingers
pounding my twelve-year-old oasis
into permanent drought.
Every tap on my body was sealed
so that the men wouldn't come
with dehydration between their legs.
Mama said it is safer for a girl to be still sands than to be running water.
4. “Adah, how are you planning on having a child with a body like that?”
my cousin throws the question at me like a rifle flung out of her mouth.
In two days, I'll be twenty years of shame.
I spent nights pulling coals and fingernails
from my memory.
Ghedi comes to visit sometimes.
He is thirsty,
but I can never convince him to drink the anger off my body.
Mama says I should marry Ghedi.
I tell her no man in his good sense will fetch water
where the water does not exist.
5. Mama still fails to understand:
79
Quicksand races in faster than tidal waves.
“Coffee?”
“Who spilled so much coffee

into my blood?”
My mother shushes me,

ties her print kerchief
around my grazed knee.
The sight of my own blood
never scared me.
Discovering how dark it is
always did.
All the women I happened to know

sprout from
the same coffee shrub.
Except Hannah —
buttercream
and sugar icing.
I bet when she bleeds,
it is coconut milk
and seafoam.
Sometimes, I catch her
gawking at me during recess,
her nostrils dilating at
the waft of brewed coffee,
her lips curving into
a question mark:
“In what playground
did you get so dirty?”
At night, it is soap lather madness,

corn-starch frenzy.
I rinse and powder,
powder and rinse
and try to shake
the brown matter
off my body.
“Scrub! Scrub! Scrub!”
I remember overhearing my mother
screeching in the bathtub,
the loofah in her grip
hardening into sandpaper
80
as she wrings the dark,
dark fluid
out of her prune heart.
All the mothers in my family
reek of baby milk
and freshly ground
coffee beans.
Some mothers even
have entire trees
branching onto their backs,
black sap
and calloused trunks.
The last time I caught
Hannah staring,
I pointed at my body
and rehearsed
my newest punchline:
“Oh, this black thing?
It just crawled on me
one night,
and wouldn't come off.”
Summer is always
easier for me.
Hannah returns from holidays,
puffed and overbaked
like a cinnamon roll.
I thank God for every
summer day
Hannah and I
got dirty in the same
playground.
81
Black Salt
Dear Suad,
I know what happened.

I know someone called you ugly today.
I know you spent hours
unbraiding history from your plaits,
plucking anger from your skin.
I know you spent days
macerating your heart in jasmine tea,
liquifying your bones so that the men
would come fetching water down your waist.
“Something is wrong with your daughter,”
I told your mother,
“She has enough black on her skin
to make a revolution out of her.
She has so much history in her hair
that no bleach can wipe it away.
Her bones are marinated in the ocean.
Her heart is seasoned with sea-salt.
What love can soften that kind of thickness?
You are her mother. How can you not notice?
Have you not taught her to wear her black proudly,
to let the salt grains plaster her bones,
to braid her hair thicker than her people's love?”
But that was a long time ago.
Suad, you are not the same combination of black meets ugly.
You will not be the same combination of black meets ugly.
The last time I saw you,

you had bullets tucked between your teeth,
flags hanging from each breast,
bayonets clipped to your braids.
“I have never seen so much black
and so much proud on a single woman,”
I told your mother,
“Your daughter carries herself like a revolution,
loves like a revolution,
ages like a revolution,
the years swarming across her forehead
82
like proud rioters.
God,
doesn’t she wear rage
well!
God,
doesn’t she waltz
with grace
to the thud of heartbreak!
Bless the girl who sings karaoke
to the sound of her own breaking!
Bless the girl who sleeps
to the lullaby
of her own wanting!
Bless the girl who keeps
falling in love
with everything she has survived!
Suad, do not be afraid to make canning jars out of your skin

and store up the world inside.
Do not be afraid to bottle the ocean in your heart.
Saline water has never tasted
sweeter,
softer,
lighter
to the mouths of men.
83
No One Names their Daughter “Khadija”
Who named you “Khadija?”
When Jason tried

to spell out your name,
he choked on the first letter
and could only
finish the rest
with backslaps.
Mustafa was too scared.
He said your name was
a swarm of drones,
said he could hear
entire cities bursting,
miles away.
Rohan used to
call you Jennifer,
but when he tasted war
on the rim of your mouth,
your name was strapped
to his tongue
like a siren.
Someone should've
warned you, Khadija,
your name is
the barrel of a gun,
your mouth
the muzzle of a firearm.
Someone should’ve warned you,
your skin is powdered with rouge
and shrapnel,
your mouth bedaubed with lipstick
and carrion.
When a man curls his fingers
around your heart,
he always has his index
on the trigger —
Men come for love.

You give them war.
84
No man has ever been able
to shove his roots,
to drill his seeds
into you.
Jason couldn't go past
your collarbone.
He said the freckles
on the nape of your neck
reminded him of
a gunpowder trail.
Mustafa came with
a jar of Vaseline,
but ended up not using it.
He said there are
red banners
lifted to your chest,
calling men for riot.
Rohan held a cigar
twice the size of his fist
and tapped it
between your breasts.
He couldn't tell then
which was ash,
which was skin.
Someone should've
told you this,
no one names
their daughter “Khadija”
unless in their dictionary,
“Khadija” is just another word
for “loss.”
But you tried to please,
didn't you?
Gave yourself a softer name,
speckled your neck
with pressed peonies
and confetti.
You tried to change,
didn’t you?
Let your heart fall
without a safety-net,
smoked it
85
over burning Palo Santo.
You are a hiding-place now
for runaway souls,
your chest an asylum
for hoarders of home,
your name a white flag
waving silently —
You give men love.

They come with war.
86
“Hayat” — A Call for Death
Nine whole years it took me to stop spelling my name like an obituary,

to stop washing the gravel from my hair,
to stop shaving the tombstones that grow over my skin.
“Hayat” they named me.
I learnt my name like a death-news,
each letter pared down to a skeleton.
One boy from school called 911 when he heard my name,
said there was a murder-scene inside my mouth,
said I spluttered earthworms and crushed bones
every time I spoke.
Another boy drew his tongue from my mouth as from a torture room,
said I reloaded shotguns behind my teeth,
said he couldn't kiss a girl who held his tongue at gunpoint.
“Hayat” was my name, and my grand, grand, grand-mother's before me.
It means life in Arabic.
I keep wondering why words almost always mean the opposite
once they're spelt by a black tongue.
Is it because we carry names that read like suicide notes?
Is it because, for generations, we passed down death like an heirloom?
Is it because we kiss like we're about to fire live ammunition and tear-gas?
What is it that makes “black” a glossary of damage?
What is it that places “black” in every equation
where the end result is destruction?
It took me years to read through the connotations of my body,
to understand to what registers my skin belonged,
to start classifying my mouth alongside armaments and combat weapons.
For twelve years, I've had a surgery-room for a mouth.
Every time a boy from school attempted to kiss me,
he would get his tongue pricked by my sutures.
Before long, his kisses would turn into curse-words.
It takes only the pinprick of a black kiss against a white lip
for love to turn into violence.
It takes only a colour
for people to find all the good reasons to kill you —
“Hayat” means life in Arabic

until the world decides it can only mean otherwise.
87
88
Where Homes Hide
I keep my homeland under my tongue.

Sometimes when I speak,
I sputter asphalt and dirt
instead of words.
And sometimes,
you try to shovel the soil out of my mouth,
the cobbles out of my language.
I'm sorry —
I'm sorry I couldn't sandpaper my accent for you.
I'm sorry I couldn't make a soft cushion out of my mouth for you.
But this body is saddled with escape roads and exit-doors.
This body will love you like you're the last plane-ticket back home,
like you’re the last life-boat back home.
But mind you!
Home will warp your back
like wire
and scuff its heel on your heart.
Home will clench a fist full of dirt down your throat
and ask you to sing an ode to freedom.
Home will tie your tongue
and ask you to speak without twisting the syllables.
Don't you realize my stammer is an ode,
an ode to the immigrants,
an ode to refugee camps,
an ode to the gravel that crunches between our teeth
because when we speak,
we are paving driveways into a foreign language?
Don't you realize the pavement cracks in my accent
are the only place left for me to grow grass and flowerbeds?
I know you're tired of hearing my national anthem instead of your name,
of watching me plan for my trip back home instead of our next date,
of kissing your way through my bones
only to face headstones.
Come touch my back.
I have a marble column for a spine.
How do you expect it to break at the pinprick of love?
Come look at my skin.
The pigment is so harsh no kiss can dilute it.
Come feel my ankles, my knees, my toes.
I've exhumed them time after time
and made a habit out of burial.
Now tell me, what do you know about home?
89
What do you know about home
except polished floors and starched beddings,
except warm milk and goodnight kisses?
I've had to do brickwork on my body,
brickwork inside my mouth,
brickwork on my lovers
to understand what home means.
And now I sound like the screech of cement meeting a chisel.
And now I smell like wet earth before it hardens into brick.
And now I taste like my skin's run out of sugar
and exchanged it for sand grains.
And yes.
It all looks like I'm finally ready
to trade in
a house
for
home.
90
Black Is Not a Colour
I know a black woman by the sawtooth smile that rips her jaw open,
that makes each laugh a police siren,
her mouth a 24/7 emergency room.
I know a black woman by the missing tongue,
the twisted vowels,
the language that grabs a choke-hold around her neck
so that her stutter sounds more
like a death rattle.
I know a black woman
when her heart is buckled to her stomach,
when her heart is belted around her neck,
when her heart is muffled
in a palm-tree-printed bandana and a lace thong.
I know a black woman by the rally of her hair,
the protest riots of her eyes,
the warfare of her arms.
Don't you know a black woman weaves soft furnishings out of her skin,
runs a guesthouse in the palm of her hands?
Don't you know a black woman hides her entire family inside her wallet,
stuffs her homeland into her pockets?
Don't you know a black woman wears a casket to birthday parties,
a sequin dress to funerals?
Don't you know a black woman when you see one?
Black is only a colour
until it starts to spread like gossip inside a room,
like scandals on national television.
Then, Black is a punchline at parties,
a calling name behind bar counters,
a joke on a stage swarming with white DNA.
until a man fits his heart inside a straitjacket,
holds his life in a hammerlock,
eats himself whole.
Then, Black is a madhouse,
a cannibal feast.
until someone sucks the fat from their skin,
draws blood from their gums,
use cremation smoke as their signature scent.
Then, Black is a carnival of blood,
a gala of corpses.
91
until you see it on a woman,
hear it in a woman,
smell it on a woman.
Then, Black is God.

Then, Black is God.
Then, Black is God.
92
“You ain’t Black, Woman!”
(To a white poet writing on black subject-matter)
“You ain't black, woman!

Do you have a noose for a tongue,
a scaffold for bones?
Are there dead bodies hanging from your mouth,
smoke billowing from the centre of your throat?
Do the words twine around your neck every time you spoke
like your own breath was enough to get you killed?
Does your accent sound like a eulogy?
Have you ever had news-reporters covering funerals
at the meeting of your lips?
Have you ever cut down on your diet to become
fat-free,
sugar-free,
black-free?
Do you know what it tastes like to have a meal
salted with your mother's tears,
peppered with your father's curses?
Do you know what it feels like
to have people fencing their properties black-proof,
dressing from head to toe black-proof,
working hard to provide their children with a life black-proof
because your skin might crawl outside your body
and get back at them?
Did you spend your childhood chewing on chalk sticks
hoping that a little white
would transfer into your cells?
Have you ever carried your heart between your teeth,
scrunched it between your knuckles,
decanted it in mason jars
because your ribcage wasn't large enough for your heartbeat?
Look at yourself, woman.
There isn't a single black thing about you.
We only write poetry if it's left a black womb,
sucked a black nipple,
got shot like a black son.
Look at these hands of mine,
these fingernails,
these eye-lids,
these teeth,
this upper lip,
this bottom lip,
93
these ankles,
these knees,
this chest;
live ammunitions.
That's how I wake up every morning knowing I'm black,
go to bed every night knowing I'm black.
That’s how I outlast labels,
punchlines,
hot news
knowing I'm black.
It's because I clog the bullet-holes
with the kind of poetry
you can never write.”
94
95
Mémoire (Or Mem-War)
She sat with war in her eyes,

between her fingers,
clinging to her skin
like incense
anyone could pick up the smell
miles away.
She was more war than woman,
more loss than human.
Her body a refugee camp,
thronged with
her people’s sadness —
In war, everyone is kin.
When she parts her lips,

lead-pellets come running
down her chin.
When she speaks,
we can hear revolvers spiralling
down her throat,
the syllables flacking off
into bullet chips.
Her parents and three children
she left back home.
Sometimes, we suspect they are
permanently grafted
onto her skin.
At night, she sees
her children,
one faceless body
of human tragedy.
Her husband's lips curl
around her neck
like rope.
When he whispers how much
he's missed her,
the words drop off like missiles
onto her heart —
War may have taught her

to give love,
but it has made receiving it
her worst fear.
96
When she was little,
her mother used to sing to her
to smother the sound of bombings.
Now, she could have her ears cemented
and still hear the bombs.
Her mother’s face
was a time-worn wallpaper.
It peeled away.
Her body a storage-room
where she jammed her homeland
behind headscarves and abayas.
She had skin scabbed
with bombed houses,
stomach littered
with rubble.
Her father was one long
strand of prayers,
his arms two minarets
rising and collapsing
for worship.
With his beard,
he could map out
the entire land
and brush the debris off
bombed cities.
Throughout her childhood,
her father recited Al-Baqarah
more times
than he addressed her
for speech.
Now, he smiles from her wallet,
the smile almost a cringe,
his beard sometimes
tangled around her heart.
Even the young men
who come to visit
from time to time,
with coconut oil
and Vaseline pots,
grease her with more shame
than love —
What war has made her into,

love can never undo.
97
Memo-Red
You've never seen rain so red,

have you? —
“Is the sky having a nosebleed?”
“Since when do skies have nosebleeds?”
You are nine,
but your heart is quilted with wrinkles.
Your mother is hiding you
under her thumbnail.
Her body thin as gauze.
Her veins blue embroidery
in relief.
Your father is a photograph
folded in four
under your mother's kaftan.
He has more crease-lines than wrinkles,
more colour on his face
than you've ever seen on your mother's.
And then, the red —
Infinite.
Infinite.
Infinite.
“God must be having a terrible nosebleed.”
“God shouldn't be leaning so much.”
You are thirty.

You are a nursing-home
for people with arthritic memories.
Inside your body, there is
water enough
to drown you,
land enough
to save you.
From under your thumbnail,
your daughter cranes upward
and wonders how large some nostrils must be.
She is nine,
but God,
how well you taught her
to wear red!
Under your kaftan,
your mother and father
are together for the first time in years.
98
And then, rain —
Heavy.
Heavy.
Heavy.
You are nine

and
thirty
and
a yellowing
photograph.
99
A Thing or Two to Know about the War
Fourteen hours
was the time it took
to pull Iman's body out of the rubble —
carbon-perfumed,
scar-jewelled.
Dead bodies always unfold like film reels:
Graduation parties,
summer vacations,
the first tooth to be plucked,
the first diploma to be received.
Every memory was stapled to Iman's body
like a Polaroid to an album.
This is another thing about war —

It makes photo galleries
out of human lives.
For the next twenty-four hours,

Iman's body would hang
from every news-stand.
A revolving door is built into her life
and in and out
and in and out
the entire world walks.
Iman is a piece of news
and sells out well.
Her twenty-year-old dreams
stripped down
to article snippets
and titles in blackletter.
This is another thing about war —

It makes newspaper stalls
out of victims.
Everyone runs by and scans.
Sometimes, I cannot help but wonder

what is more scarring to humanity:
Causing death
or making a living
out of it.
100
Where God Used to Live
(In memory of my grandmother)
Nan was a complex of arthritis and prayers.

She stuffed God inside her heart
and chewed more surahs
than bread crumbs.
« ‫» بسم هللا‬
The words stained her tongue like turmeric powder.
The beads between her fingers moved faster
than her rheumatic legs.
Her spine curved into a dome,
calling men for worship.
Her paisley headscarf was large enough
to host all the homeless inside.
Every summer, my cousins would gather at nan's,
searching for good food
and God leftovers.
Pastries blended with Koran;
we never knew for sure which we were eating.
Nan pushed food into our plates while her lips gummed the Adhan;
the two tasks seemed equally sacred.
She would not be pleased until we walked with sandbags instead of bellies.
“Eat it!”
“Finish that, now!"
“Don't make me come and feed you!”
She stranded the words with the austerity of an officer's command.
We had to bloat or else, bring shame and disappointment to the family.
When nan fell ill, her tongue coiled backward.

Her mouth became an empty temple
and the prayers echoed and echoed,
in vain,
inside.
“Has God moved houses?”
Hands no longer bejewelled

with prayer beads.
Spine collapsed over bedsheets
like a demolished dome —
Men worshipped God elsewhere now.
101
We almost forgot what the Adhan sounded like
without the clatter of unfinished plates and blunt cutlery.
The Koran sounded to our ears
like raw dough tasted to the stomach.
This summer, my cousins will not be coming for visit.
God did not move houses.
Nan did.
102
The June of Doom
It was June.
God kicked skulls like beach balls.
The sun slathered you with light
and the sea was a linen sheet,
ironed and starched,
without a kink or a pleat.
You were nine,
pearled with the nacre
of youth.
Your heart, an air-tight coffer
where your dreams
were safely stowed away.
That summer, you dreamt of growing
as tall as God.
You said God was marking off your height
with notches on the doorjamb of Heaven.
It was June
and we thought death
could never kiss the soul out of you.
It was a gusty Monday.

The wind chuckled and chuckled
as it ruffled God’s hair.
The sun licked her fingers
and slicked her light back.
The sea was a scrunched tablecloth
and the waves frills galore.
Even the seafarers struggled
to comb the tangles
out of the ocean's crest.
The other children were too busy
gulping sunlight
and inflating their lungs with salt air.
Like a boozy reveller,
the sea wriggled his foaming tongue
103
and doused you, headfirst, in his slaver.
Within minutes, your lungs fizzed
and you lay on the shore,
a masticated lump,
all slimed in the phlegm of the Mediterranean.
We watched your body unfurl like a sail
strung between life and death.
That summer, you grew tall enough
to rise skywards
and breach the grounds of Heaven.
It was June
and we thought death
could never kiss the soul out of you.
104
New Year's Eve
Two weeks now

since you left,
drenched in diesel,
the usual perfume-scent.
Your heart writhed
inside its bone corset.
Hauling your life
in a backpack,
you shuffled down
the rutted track.
You've been here before;
twice, for the record.
Somewhere between skin and bone
unfolds the road-map
to Hell.
Suicide has gentle hands,

you would say,
unkinking your limbs,
knot by knot,
like a tangle of fairy-lights.
How can you refuse it;
the soul's effleurage?
The heart is a discounted item,

so cheap you barely notice
when it goes missing.
How can you refuse it;
death's final sale?
New year
was drawing near
and you, Mother of all bargains,
had clinched your oldest deal.
A bride to smoke and fire,
you were deflowered
105
on the last evening
of December,
only that blood came
as light and ember.
Death is the suitor

you should have declined
and against his will fought,
but instead,
the bride proposed to the groom.
Childless for years,
now her own doom
she begot.
106
A Lament for October
It is October.
I am fat with prayers.
I've tried to keep pain on a diet,

to cut down on God,
but my soul puts on weight
and hobbles around on a cane.
God lounges in His office of ether,
an off-duty CEO,
expecting no more recruits.
The angels are rounding off their shifts
with a few days off.
The earth is a large potty
littered with our sins.
I force my heart out of the playpen,
tug the binky away,
teach it all about life,
over and over again —
I am tired of being thirty.
I wear love like spanks
and slap marks.
My body is a basketful of rotten eggs.
Nothing can dampen down the stench
of middle-age.
I am tired of being good,
not good
but silent.
The Devil has strung a hammock
between my lips.
I speak as little as I can
lest I wake him.
It is October.
I am fat with questions.
I would like to hide,

but the sun pokes its index into my eyes
107
and my brain comes oozing like a pustule.
I would like to sleep,
but a headache kneads my skull,
whacks one nerve at a time.
O God, I am not the September woman
who let her Rapunzel heart grow thick with love.
It is true, then.
October is when the heart goes bald.
Here, on this mattress of flesh and bone,
I wait for sorrow to thaw
and for death to leave its wharf toward me,
a barge of salt and soil,
in November.
108
The Curse
Nothing stinks like lust

in a young woman.
My cannibal heart
is drunk on its own blood.
For nearly twenty years,
it's eaten nothing but shame.
Today, it sits in my chest
like a hump on a hunchback,
useless and heavy,
heavy.
I am still teaching the tornados
in my body
to turn into summer breeze
and early-morning dew.
My last lover couldn't make it
past my mouth.
My Cerberus tongue
howling and yowling
at the gate,
his manhood sagged,
and between his legs,
I could see a Heracles,
limp and defeated,
black out.
And yes, I do believe
in happy endings regardless.
Here’s the proof:
My body is a junkyard
of love scraps
and my heart is a morgue
of unidentified lovers.
O Mother,
mother of all mothers,
the first time I bled into adulthood,
the Devil festered inside of me.
Even my heart reeked
109
of his pus.
Now, I stand at your feet
with stakes in my soul,
Satan's dentures.
Even thee cannot tweeze
the Devil out of me!
O Mother,
I wish my heart
were as selfless as thee,
but I'm already so full of myself,
so full of that rising water
kindness floats like a streak of oil.
Sometimes, I am afraid
of the god in the tumult of my heartbeats,
in the friction of my thighs,
in the clack of my heels.
I do not hear him anywhere else
and I will not pray for any other deity.
O Father,
I wish you hadn't run out of still water
when you were making me.
No one besides you knows this —
I was born looking so much

like my next victim
it terrifies me.
110
The Blackout
“Prayer is the road to God,”

the Sheikh says.
And so, I pray.

Surahs stack up my throat
like cobblestones,
gravelling footpaths
where God could walk.
I pray
imbibing too much God at a time —
A mystic is always hungover.
I pray
connecting the ether to phone wires,
leaving messages
on God’s answering machine,
but Heaven has a busy line,
hasn’t it?
God,
I bumped into you once.
I was thirteen
and dripping with questions.
Womanhood
had just set in like a bulldozer,
scraping off the tender years
of childhood.
I was told to thumbtack my virginity,
but sin did come after all:
In carcades,
in drugstore deodorant,
in rented tuxedos —
That was enough to book a room
in hell.
God,
after all this time,
I still struggle to make out the name
111
on your nameplate.
I still hang like an unfitted shirt
from your racks.
I still steep my heart in olive oil
so you don’t get a hint of the bile

inside.
“Prayer is the road to God,”

the Sheikh says.
And so, I lie flat on my prayer rug

like a shot carcass,
the stench of my prayers
filling up the room.
And so, I burn myrrh and incense
between my thighs
to repel sins.
And so, I allow the Imam
to perform four Takbirs
over the graveyard of my body.
Meanwhile, you dangle from the sky,
from your ether coliseum
like a chandelier,
wobbling to and fro.
I've tried a hundred different prayer books,
knelt inside a hundred different temples,
followed a hundred different Imams,
but none,
none
has yet stopped
the blackout
behind my eyes.
The light is everywhere
except where it should be;
in my heart.
112
The Prayer of Jasmine
Baba wakes me up for Fajr.

Says Allah is waiting.
Says Allah will be vexed
if I do not bend my body
into a folding-chair
and invite Him to rest.
Says Heaven will be ransacked
by devils and Jinn,
garlanded with dust and cobweb
if I do not pray.
Says the Angels will be busting up
the ether
overhead
if I do not lie prostrate.

Says there is a spare-room
in Eden
with an extra bed.
Says I must pack my prayers
and check in at the Afterlife
at 5 a.m.
Says I must grout my mouth,
caulk my chest,
let the wet
cement of my body set.
Says a man can never leave his footprint
on a concrete slab.

Behind him, my mother crumples
into a ball
over the prayer mat,
her heart crunching beneath her feet
like dried grass,
the raffia kissing her kneecaps
with serrated lips.
113
She draws breath
from a coffin inside,
her entire body ravelling
like a reel of thread.
Behind baba is a hundred-year-old cassette
wheezing out verses of the Koran,
the spool of tape wrapped
around my neck.
I look at baba,
his mouth foaming with threats,
his teeth mincing my heart
into specks.
Behind him is a jasmine tree
stooping against a wall;
a desolate minaret
begging for worship,
echoing with the notes
of a wilted heartbeat.
There is virtue in jasmine
rarely talked about or seen;
how it spills perfume
on the altar of beauty
and muffles its sobs
with swathes of evergreen.
And a few feet away,

the sunlit face of a girl
tails off
into a shadow of despair.
Coils of black chiffon
swirl like smoke
around her head.
She bends and breaks
five times per day,
her voice flacking off
into her lap,
her heart bleeding
a charnel jasmine scent.
She earnestly longs
to believe
this is a warm-up
for Heaven
114
but can’t.
115
Menopause at Twenty
In the lavatory,
I watch life
burn my girlhood on a pyre,
powder my belly
with cremains,
the spent matches littering my thighs.
All day, I wear the pall of ash
like a petticoat.
All day, I shed char and woodsmoke.
The logs in the alcove
are damp;
they won’t catch.
Once in every month,
womanhood barges
into my straw body
with a pack of matchsticks.
I know the hearth of the womb,
heaped with cinders
since thirteen.
I know the calendar of the flesh,
sloughing twenty years
of disappointments
like scabs
and the heart that hangs
like flypaper from my ribs.
Whatever survives inside,
survives dead.
I will be twenty-one this August.

I have been meaning to live shorter,
to keep my dying in check,
but the calories of despair
are impossible to burn off.
5, 6, …
5, 6, 7, 8, …
I can never keep count
of the demons I diet on per day.
I will be twenty-one this August.

I have been meaning to live shorter,
to halt the traffic in my mind,
but Death lurches forward and forward
116
and pulls up short.
And now I must live inside a body
rutted with skid-marks
and pump air
18, 19, …
18, 19, 20, 21 times
into the flat tyre
that sags in my chest.
You suggest I pray.

I say it's useless.
I fix up my faith with safety-pins
lest it unravels.
You suggest I try therapy.
I say it's all, all useless.
My mind is a field
of obsidian blades.
I am used to this;
carrying my life
on stretchers all year round.
I am used to this;
bandaging my heart in a sling
and injecting it with poison.
When I was thirteen,

I watched bramble
curl around my mother
and cleave to her heart.
For weeks,
I pricked my skin on her kisses
and tweezed thorns from my cheeks.
Little did I know;
the bines would ramble
over the walls of Heaven.
Little did I know;
we could die more than once.
So, when nine months later,
the thorny thickets webbed my father,
I let the burrs of his love snag my heart.
I didn't flinch.
I didn't grieve.
I didn't sprint
through the briar-patch of disease.
117
From my blood arose a squeal
of brakes,
a loud crash,
and I knew, at last —
This was
the heart's menopause.
118
To Doctor G.M
What's the use anymore?

This face,
these eyes,
this heart,
strung on me,
flopping like tassels from a table-cloth.
Where are you, Doctor?
Your kindness hurts me.
I dream of you sometimes,
the angel with saws,
blood-splattered and kind,
operating on my septic soul,
injecting my sins with blue dye,
sealing each orifice with caulk.
Quick Doctor! Quick!

I'm holding my life together
with wire
and silicone.
Stop the leak,
the broken pipe on the left,
the nozzle that pumps nerve-gas at night.
Death has lunged his tongue
in my popsicle heart.
Now I stink of his drool.
Wash me off, Doctor.
Wash me out.
Wash me away!
I wait for you Doctor,

I wait all day,
squirming on a spiked bed.
In fits and starts, Death comes,
an unfinished business,
always putting off
what it started.
It takes skill
to die fitfully,
to fall into spasms
while standing upright.
It takes practice
to jerk in and out of sleep
119
with eyes fully open
and an unblinking mind.
Will you tell me, Doctor,

what's the use anymore?
Will you teach me again
this whole living business?
I, who keep training for death,
am beginning to understand
how life was thrust at me
some August noon, 1997,
the wrong apprenticeship,
the mis-assigned job —
I wedge my heart
into a workout gear
and drill it, over and over,
on survival.
I remember father grazing on me

early in the mornings,
the 5 a.m. fodder,
moist and cloying.
I remember him
ploughing his manhood
into my body,
raking up the dead parts
of my girlhood.
I remember him strewing weeds
over sunflower skin,
forking in his white compost,
quietly,
quietly,
before mother wakes,
before God wakes,
FBI of Heaven and FBI of Hell.
And when the clock ticks 6 a.m.,
I am back to bed,
only my body isn’t there.
My eyes are fogged panes, Doctor.

I can see no more,
no more.
I'm scared.
What if I see again?
120
You should know this by now —
It’s never done me a single good
to see so much!
121
To my Fellow Insomniacs
A death gymnast,
an insomnia intern,
I fret over the bed,
a daily sport,
a major occupation,
as if maggots are sewn onto the wraps.
On my way to sleep,
I trudge through a marshland of nightmares,
barefoot,
baremind.
Each morning is a trail of the night before,

an extended footage, if you will.
Darkness runs over the sun
like a heavy truck
and all the wreck comes spilling over my head.
Insomnia hauls me up like a large crane
and suspends me in mid-air,
slewing me from side to side.
Meanwhile, October agonizes on a deathbed
of crisp leaves
and a sky canopied with black organza.
Meanwhile, a gang of demons burgles my mind,
robbing me of months of peace.
For six months,
the linen sheets hardened into bedrock.
For six months,
the sun pelted me with light
and the air tasted like hemlock leaves.
Outside, cyanide wafts from the earth

and the sea foams with napalm.
Outside, the stars scatter the night-sky
like a burst of shrapnel
and the moon spouts a belch of ash and tar —
Death is the yarn I am woven of
and the cloak I shelve
and wear threadbare.
Many a time, we are killed through life
until we die.
Many a time, we loll around in bed
flirting with Morpheus
122
and accidentally,
stir Hades' jealousy.
123
Sylvia's Death
I am a murderer.
I chucked my thirty years into the gas oven —
Tonight, I am making dinner for two.

There's wine on the menu,
gallons of rage too.
The fetor of seven years
in marriage
hangs over the house.
A bit of Kleenex,
a bit of laundry powder
and love is, once again, spanking clean.
The husband is out on some business or other.
Typically, the business takes place
a few inches down his waist.
He made me see doctors before,
spokesmen and spokeswomen of the soul,
qualified legislators of love.
I saw shamans too,
Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo
experts.
The husband waited
and waited
and waited
for the demented wife to recover,
but madness kept oozing from her brain
like a sore ulcer.
Tonight, two daughters lie asleep,

their faces snapshots
of everything I’m about to lose.
A cavalcade of lies whirrs by the house
while the husband, in some part of the city,
is performing bone-surgery
on his twisted fate.
It's almost midnight.
The pendulum,
bare-knuckle,
pounds the hours onto my head.
A licentious Cinderella is fleeing home tonight.
Another waltz with the prince would kill her.
She's running for some big date.
124
Rumour has it that her lover comes from some hot, hot place.
Drenched in his heady cologne,
he casually rolls and unrolls the hours
into that fat cigar of his.
125
Overdose
And what of my death?

The face came unglued like shrink wrap.
Then, the eyes pulled down like blinds.
Even my heart,
that old dog,
crouched down
and stopped barking for some time.
How long did the power-cut last?
My mother's head bobbed over me

like a switched lantern.
Her light hurt me.
I felt exposed,
exposed and ashamed of being alive.
When will the night
wave its hands over my wick
and snuff me out?
Outside, the earth was laid out

into a bassinet
and the wind rocked death
with her organdie hands.
When the moon bled into the dawn,
I sucked her thumb
and rolled out my skin
into a Band-Aid.
The following morning

lurched through my window,
belching its light into my face,
watching me vomit my heart out.
The nurses came and unfolded me
into one strip of parchment,
straightened my creases out,
unbuckled me from death's crotch.
I touched my skin,
a marble miracle.
It should have been easier to break.
I touched my lips,
my hair,
my eyelids,
126
clipped to me like brooches.
It should have been easier to unclasp my parts.
I touched my left breast
and the damn dog bit me.
Shouldn't it have been easier to disappear?
So, this is life;
this constant dying.
Some deaths are like flings, I assume,
they stop midway.
O mother,
I am not the same woman from long ago.
I am only a stand-in for my old self,
a sort of understudy.
Death is simple.
Dying is a great deal of work.
I lie back
and let the manufactured seeds
turn me numb and barren
for a while,
only for a while.
I am only twenty minutes away
from hell
or heaven
or the pit-stop in between.
127
The Performance of a Lifetime
(Inspired by and dedicated to Anne Sexton)
Today, I'm on vacation.

I shall not kill myself.
I shall lie down in my box of bones,
a flat shoe,
a scruffy shoe,
the wrong-size shoe.
I am not dead yet.
I am only rehearsing,
warming up for the big day,
the big performance.
I know my lines.
No one knows my lines
better than I do.
I’m the starring actress.
Death is the director.
I play along.
I stick to the script
until I get it right.
Everyone’s watching.
Everyone’s waiting
for my scene.
Will she do it?
Will she pull it off?
How can she disappoint?
But let’s not talk about this now.

Today, I’m on vacation.
In the deckchair of despair, I recline
while days unroll like a ravelled rug
on which I keep tripping
again and again and again.
The heart,
that old, old cog,
makes its usual churn,
beating all the way up to God
and back.
Have I mentioned I’ve taken up a hobby
of killing myself?
I mean, why bother repaint
over and over
the faded whitewash
128
of my life?
But no, today is different.
Today, I’m on vacation
and here’s what I’m doing:
I shall learn to live again.
I shall learn to live and love life again.
Some women dangle from their bodies
as from hangers;
frayed coats worn by no one.
I've known women like that,
women who've had the best conversations
with toothbrushes,
the sex of their lives with hair-combs,
women who have price tags stapled
to their bellies,
candy wrappers around their hearts.
women who fasten their hearts to their ribs
with duct tape,
hot-glue the lips,
the brows,
the eyes,
stuff their souls with nylon wadding.
women who are too ruined
to hand-shake life again,
too ruined to flush out their memories
down the drains,
too ruined to even realize it.
women who struggle to remain women
when they’ve lost jobs,
houses,
husbands,
their minds,
their minds,
their minds.
They sprawl all day over the bed,
those makeshift hearses,
going over their lines
for the one thousandth time
while life cries out its typical boos.
women who train their hearts
129
to do back-kicks and parries
before falling in love,
women who have powder kegs for minds,
tinderboxes for breasts.
Women like that do not make it to their forties
and if they do,
it's only because they outgrew
their biers.
In two weeks' time
will be my forty-fifth birthday.
It’s happening all over again.
It’s happening all over again.
A sort of routine by now,
a sort of liturgy,
though without the religious fondness.
My heart in the food processor,
pureed, time after time,
into porridge for the children
and …
Enough of this!
Surely, someone is on vacation today.
Let’s not ruin it for them.
Meanwhile, I shall learn to live again.
Meanwhile, I shall learn to live and love life again.
Meanwhile, the auditorium fills
and I
make entry.
130

The Book of Ache

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The Book of Ache

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Part 1: Departure

Part 2: Port of Call

Part 3: The Home Straight

Your father isn't cruel —

Your father isn't cruel —

Your father isn't cruel —

Baba is a good man.

God, doesn’t he know?

“Asma, have you done your prayers?”

God, doesn’t he pay attention?

Baba, bless him,

“Close your legs, Fatima!

When Fatima was little,

Sometimes, the men come

Fatima’s father skipped through marriage

Every man who frequented Fatima

Fatima made the terrible mistake

No, not dead

How could this happen?

For so long, your albatross body hovered over me,

We should’ve known, daddy,

Is this how fathers die?

For years, I’ve tried to clamber up your jaw.

Here, let me help you pack

Look daddy, I shall not grieve.

When I turned thirteen,

I’ve tried, daddy.

Even mother scorns you

I know you love me

Mother says men like you

The last time I saw you,

Your daughter has problems.

Your daughter has problems.

You are her father —

Your daughter has problems.

You are her father —

O Mother, how could've I escaped it?

Something is starting in my belly,

I never asked to be woman,

Most days, I forget I'm thirty.

Something in my belly is swelling and yelling,

I cannot have you

“Sabah” — I would've named you

The nurses had agreed on a certain faceless kindness.

On the last day, maggots started growing

“It’s time my cookie, are you ready?”

I sit with my heart inside my jaw.

For twenty years,

« ‫» أعوذ باهلل من الشيطان الرجيم‬

« ‫» أعوذ باهلل من الشيطان الرجيم‬

« ‫» أعوذ باهلل من الشيطان الرجيم‬

You cannot love me, Ahmad —

What is love like, Ahmad?

How can I learn to love, Ahmad,

How to explain to you?

You see what I mean,

I had sat for the “We're not fit

You understand the difficulty now.

What happened before that?

I had known other men,

Oh, wait a minute!

Did I just make this up?

Wait for it, there’s more...