poems/skin/truth
by Manal Ahmed
poems.
i think i’ve started to hate writing a little bit— recording and re-recording, sketching, reconfiguring, remembering and documenting until it’s impossible to distill truth from memory and memory from truth, non-truth from non-fiction. i think, maybe, poems repulse me a little bit, so that as i sit reading them, i can only wish they made no sense to me at all, that it was not this easy to unfurl and uncoil and unravel in front of you, that it was not so simple to surrender to a feeling from so long ago, recorded neatly in purple cursive (why must you make your ‘u’s like that, so that there is a closing where there should be more space? and look, your ‘p’s, always drooping sideways.)
these days, i resist sidewalk alliteration. there are no hidden metaphors in street names and even fewer in coffee cups and tea leaf constellations; forgive me for staying in place, unshifting, unyielding, stubborn in the face of all this swaying.
i like how the trees look from up here, bowing and leafless.
skin.
something about the years has turned me lazy, full of sad lethargy and tuesday’s droopy stillness. i remember prying a shareefa open, that beaded, bejeweled fruit sitting soft atop kitchen countertops. separating skin from seed, counting fruit veins and fruit nerves.
all your million little black eyes winking at me through white flesh and thick custard.
but something about the years has made me suspicious of such sweet tastes. and anyway, it takes too much time, far too much patience to pry open a shareefa these days. these are childhood distractions, reserved for half-baked poems and useless romances.
so I just sit there and watch you eat. i try not to look at all the white flesh stuck between your teeth.
truth.
hitckhi. hesitation. halki. halaq-i. like from the throat. things that come out of the heart that get stuck in the halaq. words that don’t come out for a long time, then tumble out at the worst.
‘koi baat pet mein nahi rehti.’
when did we make our body parts— these limbs, these hands, these fingers—reservoirs of our truths? what do words and bodies have in common, if not shame?
if i can’t stomach this truth, find a home for it in the lining of my abdomen, i may as well belch it out. this Unravelling, this Collapsing… how strange to have an audience.