how

today i caught myself

satisfied

in the midst

of anger

and happiness

and sadness

in between his lips

squeezed in spaces breaking words

i looked around at the trees

and something in that very moment

made my soul

crack open

and breathe.

 

tell me who to be tomorrow

there were only 3 possible ways of being,

one,

i could pretend that it had never happened,

suppress the guilt until it becomes another stranger i do not address,

two,

i could accept it, allow myself to transcend it, and continue my journey

with the virtues i have solidified my whole life,

or three,

let it change me, become someone accordingly vicious and vile,

forgetting i was ever myself.

— i was looking for faith in all the wrong places

 

my imagined hurt

you hurt me

in the worst way

possible;

you did not

notice.

the likelihood of me

i can’t keep helping you;

that dream of yours

in which you think

i will be the trophy

wife;

the woman who knew

how to compose herself

while you ranted about

your sexual

encounters.

sleep-talking is how

i know

i will never be the person

you should be waking to.

in the morning,

i will slip into your clothes

and leave you

to bask in the light

of your most recent

regret;

me.

orgasms and fragments

I do not feel anything,

but things have never been felt for me

 

between my legs are ideas

between the skin folds of the divine

 

I rain in second thoughts and

incompleted sentences

I am the frag-

meant to orgasm at every question.

 

my chest pains

I can say

that when I saw him

It was friendly

(which it was)

and my likeness receded

to friendliness

(relatively true at particular points)

But against all

rationalities

(a particularly familiar and cliche love-struck feeling)

I still saw us together

(an imagining painted by colors whose frequencies did not exist)

Even when he seemed in a different place

and I completely

un-intimate

It still seemed right;

impractical;

wrong in most ways

But I think it hurt me, more,

to think of us not ending up

‘together’

the reality struck me as obvious and hurtful

and I’ve never (almost always)

been so perfectly out of

line

and I only hope;

(hopelessly romanticize),

that years later,

(or seconds)

In a moment of pure friendship

he feels a tinge

something of an itch

of what I felt

in my mind

because I;

one,

can only hope.

(for you)

(for your love)

(for your being to touch my being)

(differently)

beyond the parentheses

closing in on me

when they ask what i’ll do when i graduate

i don’t think i can be

a significantly

bad

or a significantly

good

person;

i’m barely

a person

 

impossibilities and death (my country)

My country is not friendly

it will try to deceive you into believing that it is the land

of history

culture

and beautiful traditions

and maybe we are all that

but lately,

our country has been conquered by

zealots,

half of it is a cemetery

for the burials of the youth

and the other half:

the murderers

and the witnesses

standing

in an ominous silence

that stretches farther than action,

we cope with loss

discuss politics as an unreachable ground

at a cafe,

we know that our government is unconstitutional,

that our blood

is cheaper than

the Egyptian pound,

and that we might not make it alive

because we don’t speak loud enough,

we do not move generations,

we only implement precautionary measures and hope

the issues of our modern society

dissolve on their own.

 

-impossibilities and deaths (my country)

 

On Cherries and Daisies

I love the taste of cherries.
Their strong stems and their swollen seeds.
Their color and their glimmer.
Like a reflecting ever-strong shield.

I never liked the daisies.
Ever since The Great Gatsby.
I fell out of love with roses.
When I realized I was taught nothing
about the remaining flower population
but color and scent.

I love the taste of cherries.
But their season here only lasts a month.
I guess the daisies are pretty.
I just need to stop remembering Fitzgerald’s narrative
of a character with the same name.

The daisies are everywhere
all year round.
They all think I should go around collecting daisies
rather than sit back sucking on my cherries.

But I love the taste of cherries.
And I don’t want to go liking daisies too much
for the fear they’ll make me forget
how all year round
I keep sucking at my taste buds
for the remaining taste
of cherries.

A Short Memory on Patriarchal Societies

The sun lights up the trees, like my gasp for air, filling my lungs with your presence.
—
They taught us about how girls were meant to be jars filled up with other people. How we were containers of everything else. The hole; the hollow. Our genitals were metaphors for our characteristic properties.

And unlike the men of our society, we swallowed.

We were created to match the men of our society. Or so they tell us.
They tell us of how our independence is heresy. How the mere existence of emptiness is synonymous with need for presence.

Oh what blasphemy it would’ve been to think yourself as human and complete as a man.

—

He was bought up in a home where all vases were continuously filled and refilled with flowers and broken stems.

His mother detested the sight of transparent glass. And so when the days did come and winter took away all color from flowers, his mother would break the glass, refusing to believe in the beauty of the hollow.