Safia Elhillo

in the divorce i separate to two piles books: english love songs: arabic
my angers my schooling my long repeating name english english arabic

i am someone's daughter but i am american born it shows in my short memory
my ahistoric glamour my clumsy tongue when i forget the word for [ ] in arabic

i sleep unbroken dark hours on airplanes home & dream i've missed my
connecting flight i dream a new & fluent mouth full of gauzy swathes of arabic

i dream my alternate selves each with a face borrowed from photographs of
the girl who became my grandmother brows & body rounded & cursive like arabic

but wake to the usual borderlands i crowd shining slivers of english to my mouth
iris crocus inlet heron how dare i love a word without knowing it in arabic

& what even is translation is immigration without irony safia
means pure all my life it's been true even in my clouded arabic
...

my roommate one year in college
would say of my smallness
that any man who found me attractive
had a trace of the pedophilic


& i would shrink newly girled
twenty-one with my eyebrows
plucked to grownup arches sprouting
back every three weeks
in sharp little shoots already men
have tried to steal me


in their taxis corral me into alleyways
of the new city already
the demand for my name though
no one ever asks how old i am


though no one ever did i feel creaking
& ancient in the repetition
of it all i feel my girlhood gone for
generations my entire
line of blood crowded with exhausted
women their unlined faces


frozen in time with only a thickness
about the waist a small shoot
of gray to belie the years


i make up names to hand
to strangers at parties
i trim years from my age & share without
being asked that i am
fifteen seventeen & no one blinks
no one stops wanting


i am disappeared like all the girls
before me around me
all the girls to come


everyone thinks
i am a little girl & still
they hunt me still they show their teeth
i am so tired i am
one thousand years old one thousand
years older when touched
...

sour heat of the taxicab my thighs stuck by sweat to the leather
in the aperture of the sunless hours i sit scarved in the quiet
that i think will protect me i've spent days inside & untouched
by human noise & i forget the lesson in the old hurts
that mark my kneaded body & sometimes i do not even register
the hands that steer the vehicle the man from which they protrude

until his eyes in the mirror hook the light & i see his want thrusting
into the backseat a leer scraping like a fingernail along my skin
dumb prey shut in the cage with its wolf while his looking catalogs
my edible parts gleaming in stripes by the streetlights & hushed
in brief sanctuary by the dark & the silence i've gathered will throb
when he asks is this where you live & i work to keep my face unchanged

& maybe sometime in the dimming past i was still unmarked
my girlhood body unoccupied by warning its curiosity still free to extend
to a strange or recognized hand engineering an unfamiliar ache
before my shame became my native tongue became the sovereign of my flesh
i had my milkteeth smiled green as a seedling in photographs in their silence
i was pure & cloistered & i did not yet need to take inventory

for my body to feel like mine the driver's eyes displace me & leave behind a list
of ways i can be hurt of all the places i am a door its use unaltered
by my yes or no outside the streetlights change to a bridge's trusses & i say nothing
the car points into a borough not my own while i watch the distance swell
between my watching & the slab of girl fastened to the backseat useless little carcass
so faraway in her smallness & already going missing already bored by pain

& sometimes even those whose touch i choose who mean me only tenderness
will with their smell or voice or a trick of the light or the faintest touch of an index
finger trip the latch that lets me out to the space above my peeled & emptied rind
when i return i tell this to my lover who braids himself to me & makes me new
who takes into his mouth my broken name & in an exhale of smoke it emerges
weathered but complete & still mine until i remake myself from stillness

& drape myself in the life of a different girl rupture smoothed over like the noiseless
surface of a lake & in the taxi i look out to the evening's copper bruising
i give directions i push away his looking & feel my body reinflate
i dial my lover's voice the car points homeward & my old panic melts back into its archive
when he fills the backseat with sound & maybe i can be reborn
as a girl who does not go missing a girl someone will look for no longer the decorative husk

men make me with their want the quiet shrinks & i come unstuck from the leather
i come unstuck from my hurts pay my fare & debark the car untouched
my home protrudes like a lighthouse from the night i settle the body mine to register
...

a girl buried to the chest
in red earth her wrists

bound beneath the soil
with twine a crowd gathers

to father her its infinite
hands curved loosely around

a stone small enough
that no single throw is named

as cause of death no single
hand accountable to the blood

the girl undaughter unnamed
unfaced undone from the lineage

her photographs pulled already
from bookshelf from walls her father

among the hands his pebble
streaked with quartz the first to rise

to carve the air & arc toward the girl
the rootless tree faceless & erect

& perhaps the stones twisting
like fireworks the girl

their nucleus rise & rise
for a time opposite of rain

opposite of  hail & perhaps the silence
a beat too long & another

another & then a rustling
of  wings above the girl

a flock thick mixed cloud
of avifauna partridge & nightjar

& golden sparrow & avocet
& lapwing & every other sort

of  plover & ibis & heron & gulls
though the sea is far & to the north

& the minutes pass & the girl is untouched
& each bird in its beak tongues a stone

•


[what if  i will not die]


[what will govern me then]


[how to govern me then]


[what bounty then on my name]


[what stone what rope what man


will be my officer]
...

inety-nine names for my god
though i know none for my [ ]

a failing not of my deity but of
my arabic not the language

itself rather the overeager mosaic
i hoard i steal i borrow

from pop songs & mine
from childhood fluency i guard

my few swearwords like tinkling
silver anklets spare & precious

& never nearly enough to muster
a proper arabic anger proper arabic

vulgarity only a passing spar
always using the names of animals

i am not polite i am only inarticulate
overproud of my little arsenal

a stranger blows a wet tobacco kiss
through the window of my taxi

& i deploy my meager weapons
[dog] [pig] [donkey]

& finally my crown jewel
i pass my tongue across my teeth

crane my neck about the window
& call [your mother's ]
...

i was mothered by lonely women some
of  them wives some of them with

plumes of  smoke for husbands all lonely
smelling of  onions & milk all mothers

some of them to children some to old names
phantom girls acting out a life only half

a life away instead copper kitchenware
bangles pushed up the arm fingernails rusted

with henna kneading raw meat with salt
with coriander sweating upper lip

in the steam weak tea hair unwound
against the nape my deities each one

sandal slapping against stone heel sandal-
wood & oud bright chiffon spun

about each head coffee in the dowry china
butter biscuits on a painted plate crumbs

suspended in eggshell demitasse & they
begin i heard people are saying

i saw it with my own eyes [ ]'s daughter
a scandal she was wearing [ ]

& not wearing [ ] can you imagine
a shame a shame
...

i was born

at the rupture the root where

i split from my parallel self  i split from

the girl i also could have been

& her name / easy / i know the story

all her life / my mother wanted

a girl named for a flower

whose oil scents all

our mothers /

petals wrung

for their perfumei was planted

land became ocean became land anew

its shape refusing root in my fallow mouth

cleaving my life neatly

& my name / taken from a dead woman

to remember / to fill an aperture with

cut jasmine in a bowl

our longing

our mothers'

wilting

garlands hanging from our necks
...