In a room full of women who look like home, watching their smiles as welcoming as mats, I am reminded that my type of beauty looks nothing like theirs. Nothing silk soft like how they hold the gazes of men. Habibi, I have my mother’s eyes you know. I imagine there was nothing gentle about … Continue reading Hold your gaze
Leave your gentle at the door. Let me kiss you and make your lips quiver like sex on a broken bed. Personify my eyes to make them walk the landscape of your body. Tonight, you are the grounds of California and I am the earthquake shaking your city of thighs. ————————————————————-
I woke up this morning and sat at my grandmama’s feet. The purest form of energy making a halo above me. My grandmama is the type of beautiful that makes me imagine the entire world is soaked in God. Her face wrinkled like an aged map. Her eyes like planets make her face a constellation … Continue reading Grandmama
You will not find what you are looking for here. Go home. I lost limbs and substance fighting this war. Go home. Love is that war. Go home. I held a white flag. Go home. The lover is always the loser. Go home. Open your doors wide. Meet a woman who will not leave you … Continue reading The night sky and war times
1. You write like someone who has been cut open. Dragging your guts a metre into a verse. They say heartache. We, poets, say alchemy. We can make almost anything look beautiful, like the suicide bombers inside our chests. Tick, ticking, waiting for a boom. 2. In 1969, your grandfather was expelled from a country … Continue reading Alchemists
“Depression is a good lover. So attentive. Has this innate way of making everything about you” – Kait Rokowski To think of naked branches of trees I am reminded of a girl who believed she could make dying an art. Closed her eyes and jumped off the 20th floor. Limbs crooked like branches of Bur … Continue reading Dendrology
WARNING: May contain strong language. “If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling” – Fernando Pessoa There is a reason for fucking with the lights out. It has nothing to do with hiding our monsters away. They already reside in the darkness of our insides, juggling our organs, hidden by … Continue reading Lights out
You write an entire collection of poems for the man you love. He replies you with silence. When you heard “I love you” you did not realise that it was only an echo of your own. You should have known that You were here, in love, alone.
I tell my friend John Paul that in an earthquake all broken things break together. Since then, we spend most nights trying to unmask most things, Like metaphors and melancholy. I tell him between the ages of 16 and 20 I had saved up enough time to buy my heart some running shoes. He tells … Continue reading Running shoes
I have had people tell me that my writing can get grotesquely unrefined. For this reason, I should write only about Africa. I wonder, why do people think a whole continent need to be associated entirely with darkness.
When you kiss me you shall taste all the men that have come before. You will taste the desert on my tongue, the scorching sun at the roof of my mouth, the storm between my teeth. You will know that you have brought something that separates you from the rest. You will taste like fireworks … Continue reading To the one who’s next
You love him because he smelt like fresh laundry and sunlight. He reminded you of mornings in your country and the dance of bed sheets hung outside on a line. Love began to smell like home. Then the war starts but you had already given your heart to a man who would run at the … Continue reading Then the war starts
“You can’t make homes out of human beings” – Warsan Shire You visit the man you love. But he does not love you back. You kiss him Like you are trying to fill all of yourself into him Because your body is too painful to continue to inhabit. You wish he swallows your heart with … Continue reading The Visitation
I love you Like reverse metamorphosis. The butterflies in my stomach Goes back into cocoons So that they can become butterflies again. We say hello once more And they flutter out of my mouth. Every of my smile safety-pinned itself from cheekbone to cheekbone. Sunrays ricocheting off teeth exhibited by laughter. You collect these winged creatures … Continue reading Acid reflux of a masochist: Love is vomit