Embalm
Content warning: sexual violence
“Is death what you are doing to me now
or is it the death of language?”
–Mahmoud Darwish, tr. Fady Joudah
My nights are full of hurts. My body, a compass
to navigate the atlases of their darkness.
Men chart their stain across my skin. My mouth
merges with the needle, blood the gasoline
on my lips. All it ever does is burn.
Without the needle, there is absence.
I still feel its detail dented in the flesh
like a fish thrashing on land, its conspicuous
black eye shining with violence,
inconspicuous in the eyes of the people
circled around. I stopped screaming
after I died. I couldn’t breathe. I forgot
language. When I showered after returning home,
I do not know if it was water or his sweat
blistering my thighs. Told a boy I met
four months later about the rape.
When he tried to kill me, I was prepared
for it. I did not scream. I was on
the floor like his fucking shadow.
His fist, the needle in my mouth, filling the absence.
When I died again, the wound stayed open.
A clock, unwound. A compass, spinning.
Nobody could tell the difference
between my blood, the rain, and the
garbage hinging alleyways together.
See—this is how we are different.
The way I can camouflage. The way I
could prepare my body for death.
Soap. Ibuprofen. Soil. Marrow.
His hand, the spade.
When I died this time,
there was no body of mine left to
bury. No breath. No shadow.
Not even absence.
Gentlest of Bleeding Things
Somebody told me grief is the door
and not the room. I had spent most of my life
thinking each entrance, each slight
interstice in the walls was an invitation for darkness.
How I let it fester and saturate. How I allowed it
to tire me without letting me collapse
from it. When I wrote poems about trauma,
the words on the page shut their eyes,
and could not look at me again. I have tired language and
now I create sentences like journeys without destinations.
Today, I thought about Palestine,
the olives, the cafés peppering the shoreline,
the beautiful children, the pained sky waiting for silence
to speak again. I went down to the beach in the
afternoon for the first time in eight months.
On the sapphire of water, a boat circled
the palm of the ocean. On the boat,
bodies touched each other through the curtains of dream.
I have wanted to be a beautiful thing for all my life,
I’ve swarmed the world looking for it
without realising my face has been turned
away the whole journey.
Star-spangled
We found a sky so blue it ached,
clutched sand in the creases of our
hands like it was ours to keep.
Prayed, kneeled, didn’t kiss. Your fingers
knotted around a brown ale bottle &
I imagined them on these lips, your
name my half-uttered secret.
Twelve hands on the clock
and I’ve been with you through
every hour, still feels like I’ve
only known you for
one. The pendulum of waiting:
I am not sure how much
more strain my heart can
take. The red wine—so
delicious. The night, too.
Scribbled a love poem
on your cheek, tucked away
a tuft of your hair, pocketed
you, my American dream, like
a stone made heavier by rain.
Played your photo to the Lana
song about fishes & the bayou,
and I wonder how the
sky finds comfort in being
bound to the earth when
she doesn’t ever dress herself.
Our train tickets expire but we
talk. Your heart lags behind
mine, but I can romanticise even
dying things. Your love
expires & still I stack my heart
delicately in your palms,
gift you my pulse if you
promise to live through me.
Tide runs like threads through
your fingers, so familiar
in your hands, still it bleeds.
Ali C is a poet. His debut chapbook, NIGHT OF THE FIRE, is forthcoming with Ethel, a Micro Press in spring 2025. To read more: alixyz.club