honey & lime

What the owls say about misery

Every night, I stare at the stars long enough to wish my mother

pregnant with a boy child  

begging the earth to steady her so she would stop spilling life on the rugs

I fall asleep to owls hooting "loss is parental"                                                                                     Yet my nightmares begin by day in the middle of mother's empty eyes

& her too firm breasts

It is a blessing, an Allamdullilah said through lips pursed just so

Emptying it of meaning; not all of us will be born, cruel,

a valley between our legs instead of a phallus, our tongues

sticking out of our mouth in a defiant refusal to cry.

I'm sure father thought mother loved watching the wind

whistling through the periwinkle clouds, wasting away.

I know she looks, she finds the faces of the children she's lost in the clouds

& wonders why god keeps taking them for himself.

What good would it do a woman to become a prayer of thanks

& empty herself of meaning

I used to wish my mother was a sailor,

so she could find land and scream above the whisper of her soul " ahoy, ahoy!"

I watch mother's legs become two K's locked in a passionate kiss

a stopper to blood, or male seed carelessly planted

Father says he can't see himself in me, calls me a star refusing to shine brightly enough

I could have been a boy; equal to the stars I beseech

I have watched pain build sandcastles in our home

& I have kissed the floor before their Lords, sweeping the imprints of mother's feet on the carpet a million times,

hoping she would just walk away.

I hear the weeping, as the walls become paper thin enough for my breath to pass through

I see the blood trickling through her fingers. It is night, I am staring at my ceiling. I grow weary, I have become too tired to heal.