IMAGES // NOUF ALHIMIARY

what if i fill out the form with truer answers,
write down how i’m best at looking with blind
eyes at photogenic secondhand moments?
and mailing love poems to the graveyard of
love, addressed to all dead inamoratos.
                                        (when the water rises, you
                                        better be fast, caution has
                                        always caused you accidents)
my tongue’s not for licking
love, its burnt buds don’t
heal fear, they can’t fill you
up or satisfy your hunger. 
you can run away; 1, 2, 3,
but it lives where i live.

5. // REEM

i am living in a dug hole with fantastic lights and bodies sprawled on top of each other gasping for air, picking dreams out of his hair, hold my breath until someone starts singing. tom waits saved a night or two with cigarettes, we're playing pianos with backward hands and i don't know what they say about the mind, it's rural, and futuristic, classified just in the humming section. i moisturize my nose, feverishly, i have a heart that can't be chained, too, but i try too hard to keep it with you, i don't want it either.

HEAL // JOHARA ALMOGBEL

Line your eyes, powder your cheeks. Smear your lips with rouge. You cannot be seen in the flesh, you cannot be the real you. You are an automaton, and automatons look good. Walk straight. Don’t breathe. You are not an adult until your hair is straight, you are not human until your back is straight and you are not safe until your skin is hidden beneath layers and masks and words. Paint yourself, and paint some more, paint until you reach your lisa smile and then again until you’re nothing but a statue in the midst of other statues in a square draped with ivy and smothered in fog. And then raise your head, and be proud, and let your unnatural beauty shine.

For now, now, you are acceptable. You will blend. You will be free. Until the night comes, and you wash it all away.

[Wake up flawless.]

DAWN PRAYER: PT. 1 // HAYAT A. SAHEB

Wudhu:
You’re seeing her naked for the first time, her olive skin is shimmering through the florescent lights. Her hair filled with henna, you despise it but are blinded by the hardness in your pants and how black every strand it.

Position:
You want to shout the word God, the word that you’ve been exhaling every time you see something as beautiful but you can’t because this is everything you are not supposed to see and feel but she is there; she is yours now, you are the only one she has.

Raise your hand and Say “Allahu Akbar”:
You walk up to her while unbuckling your pants, she’s watching you, she’s shaking in fear but you don’t care so you feel her two and you are astonished because you’ve only felt like this once when your second cousin Khaled brought some magazines to the camp but their breasts were bigger, you want to be disappointed, you want to take her back to her father but you only cup her breasts and feel your hands beneath the hair standing up refusing to be yours.

Repeat “Allahu Akbar”:
It doesn’t matter, you think. In front of God and all his servants, today, the sheikh declared her yours.

Her skin will oblige by time.

MY ELEPHANTINE // HAYAT

My elephantine, 

I woke up today steady, my right ear has been trapping bees inside of it afraid of my increased silence recently, it keeps on feeding it the kisses you left on it and telling my brain to alert the rest of my body of a war against me but I did what you told me once to do and kissed parts of me and reminded them that you will visit them soon, they calmed quiet but my ear didn’t, I guess it was just pushing me to leave the windows open and sing with the rattling trees.

UP AND DOWN // JOHARA ALMOGBEL

Up and down
And all around
The merry carousel goes..

A tip, a tap
In a teeny gap
Grows a secret bloody rose.

“Look mummy, see!”
Cries a he
as the twisting flower glows

Only.

Leaves asunder
Roots start to plunder
All the souls nearby

The horses knocked askew,
The mummies started to stew
And the kids began to cry

Soon the town
Was but a brown
Stain ‘neath the big blue sky

And then the rose bled
marked the earth red,
and moved in the blink of an eye!

Somewhere else.

And it smiled,
as it grew more,
straight straight
up from hell.

4. // REEM

you don't understand so many things, you pull away, and while you do so, he pulls back in, seducing me with motorcycles and a sideways smile. i'm a sucker for both of you - just inside my coffee cup - i am a freak of nature, i found out, i don't know how to talk.

ELSEWHERE // NOUF ALHIMIARY

you always ask me
to view the world
the same as you do
to put on your vision, 
and wear your senses,
because i wear you out,
and you tire of explaining.
i think it’s impossible.
not because of the
given fact i can’t extract
your eyeballs from
their sockets to use
as binoculars. 
but because when i
say exile, you,
consumed by the tear 
stained sensitivity,
think of people forced
out of homelands. when i
think of a liberating launch
toward and an unknown
elsewhere, open to
endless possibilities.

THE SUN // SHAHAD T

I am a good daughter.
Are you really?

I am worthy of being proud of.
I am worthy of so much love.

Repeat that again, and again.

You try so hard to satisfy her.
You both cry.
And a dawn of a new day awakens you to the same, endless cycle.

We are both getting sick.

Physically sick, mother.

Can love be the cause of death?

Is being fixated with the sun's beauty a sure way of becoming blind?

Oh, mother!
Perfection does not exist.

It all slips away.
Everything does.

Oh, mother!
How will I ever calm our hearts?

Your embrace is too tight.
But no!
Don't let go!

Oh, mother.
I am yours.
Aren't I?

Stinging wounds.
No one knows.
They love us.
We are perfect.
Sisters, they say.

Oh, mother..

My purest love.
Cleansing me
Ever so ruthlessly.

Blurriness.
I can't see.

A cost?
Maybe.
It is the greatest, afterall.
The greatest love
that kills
But it only
keeps you alive.