Category Archives: Writing Club Projects

War

To my former lovers I want to say:

I take it back.

From the
love letters and
the notes scribbled on napkins to
every syllable I have ever uttered,
from the
stolen glances and
the hands held under tables,
to the kisses raw with lust,

this is me officially dissolving

            everything.

Even when my hands
were held to my beating
heart and every
word I spoke dripped with
honesty – know that I
might have thought I
meant it then

but I know
now that my tongue has
been dabbling in dying
dialects of love and has
only tasted its true origin
sixty-six days ago.

So I take it all back.

And to you I will say:

Lover,

I am a warrior.
The natural state of my fists
has always been clenched
and ready. My skin has always
been black and blue with
disenchantment. I am the
soldier and the battleground,

but for sixty-six days now,
there has been no war inside
my chest, no bickering
of the organs -
no head against heart;

I belong
peacefully
to you.

And my hands,

Lover,

my hands are no longer discouraged
hearts held up before my eyes
ready to throw the first punch,

you have grown Sunflower fields
on my lifelines so my arms are
always outstretched and my palms

are always open
searching
for your Light.

Wanderlust

 

(This is a collaboration piece we worked on for The Writing Club. Parts in regular font are by Mimi, parts in italics are by me.)

 

When you left I painted all my walls black, because you took the colour out of my life.

I find all these shades of grey soothing, but they all remind me that I am alone.

I stand here, empty. I lay here with an ache in my heart and I am constantly trying to keep these porcelain bones from falling apart. I find my arms are always tightly gripping at my rib cage because I am afraid I’d one day let go and collapse.

Without you, I am tied up in knots; I cannot be untangled. Lover, I miss your warm hands on this currently unwelcoming body of mine. I loathe this thirst I cannot relieve. I still remember the time you undressed me with your eyes and how I truly felt naked. And how that spark in your gaze dulled with time, till I could no longer see into your thoughts. I understood my heart wasn’t considered home any more.

You are gone now, my dear, and I still cannot fathom a life without you. I refuse to build an existence around this black hole that is myself, I seem to reek of depression and suck up all the sadness these walls have to offer, and you should know that there is much despair in the blackness of it all.

You should also know I piled all the letters you wrote me into my fireplace,

but I still don’t have the courage to burn them down to ash. I doubt I’ll ever be able to muster it up, you were always the brave one, I long for your shadow in the face of this glaring sun.

I can’t find my way home in this city any more.

You left me here to wander.

***

Lust taints my after-midnights and keeps trying to feed the ghosts that reside in the shallow holes I’ve dug inside myself. (It fails drastically, but I keep telling myself that maybe the next time’s the charm.)

Every time I inhale, I exhale a thought of you. In my efforts to forget, I have tried to suppress my breathing, but I have confirmed what science says about the body always being able to resist that – I wish it would resist your memory just as strongly.

I find you in the ellipsis at the end of my every broken thought, dot-dot-dotting my vision like a light that has shocked my pupils with its divine brightness.

I find you in my four a.m. cigarettes, threatening to end me faster than the devious clouds of carbon monoxide.

I find you sleeping on the collarbones of every lover I have undressed after you, assuring me that no one else will ever measure up. (And no one ever, ever does.)

I find you in every night sky I look up at, reminding me that every shooting star – every flicker of light is more a death than a chance at redemption.

I broke all my rules the moment your lips met mine, and I broke myself in the process. How I wished to be able to wash all those loveless love affairs off my pores and present myself new and pure for you, but I knew that I could never be what you deserved.

You kissed me so full of faith and you made a home out of my bones even when I told you they were fragile enough to shatter at any given moment.

So even though I left, Lover, I never chose to leave; leaving picked me out of the 490,000 other babies that took their first breath on the same day I did and branded me with a fire beneath my feet that always had me running. For you, I have tried to withstand the flames that ate at my soles but it wasn’t long before I grew weak again.

(I would have asked you to chainsaw right through both my ankles if I knew you’d have had the guts to, but I knew all too well of your aversion to blood, so instead I amputated your waist from my arms and was left to deal with the blood myself. No matter how many times I wash my hands, it never leaves my skin.)

So even though I left, and even though you don’t belong with me, I want you to know that you belong within me – you are the phantom limb every cell of my skin aches for. My vagabond heart had settled for you, even though I couldn’t get my hands to do the same, and still in every corner of the world I run to, even the phantasms take your shape.

I am forever haunted by all the hope I saw fading off your face.

So if every pair of lips I’ve ever kissed is a country, I am backpacking my way through state lines to forget you.

 

Skin

I am a glass bowl.
My goldfish heart
needs to be reminded
every five seconds
of who it really is
and more often than
not, I just swim
around in circles
trying to figure out
how and when I drowned.
But I keep sinking
and rock bottom keeps
pulling away from me
and I miss the feel
of solid ground beneath
my feet and my mother
once told me that
falling is just another
form of flying so I have
made a home of this
chronic descent.
I am the product of
everything that has ever
brought me to my knees.
I am the product of
decades’ worth of scraped
skin and I know I have
made my own bed and I
know that the polite thing
to do is to just
lay in it but I swear
that I have forgotten
how to lay still.
Teach me
to remember.
Teach me
to open my hands because
I’ve closed them off
for so long that I
have even forgotten how
to hold myself.
But understand:
I am neither  unbreakable
nor fragile.
I am all these
stories trying to claw
their way out of skin
and I will not rest
until I’ve spoken.
Understand:
I am restless, reader.
Understand:
this isn’t art or beauty,
what I do to myself on a
daily basis, and this is neither
joy nor sadness, what you
see on my face, but I will
breathe in this
water and quietly will it
to seep out of my fingers
in ink because my goldfish
heart has lived too many
lives in a lifetime and
all I’m left with are
these stories so
understand me when I say:
I am learning to breathe
unconventionally. My
pen is cutting gills through
my skin. I am learning to
breathe and I am teaching
myself resilience.
I am a glass bowl and
today my heart
is a goldfish, but I am
working on it becoming
that ray of light reflecting
colours on the walls
of my chest, and reader;
I promise that one day,
I will get there.

Fear

We dug our graves with our bare hands,
carved our tombstones with lines of our
favorite poems. We chiselled nostalgia
into stone, made warm homes out of
our inevitable demises.

We the ones in love with the melancholy
of verse. We the ones infatuated with
guilt; we fed off the bittersweetness
of forbidden longing and called ourselves
and each other lovers.

But sometimes
I think
we were never lovers.

Sometimes I think we never possessed
one another.

Sometimes I think I grabbed and pulled
at that gravel with what I could never
tell was only the ghost of you.

There are chapters in our book even I’m
not sure are true.

There are verses I don’t know if you
wrote or if I wrote them to you.

There are poems with so much life that
I can’t help but wonder how either of
us managed to pen them when we were
always dying of hunger.

There are lifetimes before you that I
can’t even remember.

I want to know if you remember.

I want to know if you recall exactly
how you felt that night I buried my
I love yous in the back of your neck,
how I tripped on the syllables until my
tongue tied the words in knots that slept
on my palate until they fell asleep
under your skin.

It took courage to speak them out loud
and I could never find bravery anywhere
within me.

My weaknesses ended me.

I want to know if you remember the way
I clenched my fists that night in November
when I finally breathed that sigh of closure.

I don’t know if you knew it was over.

I don’t know which one of us picked up
that shovel and filled up those graves
to bring redemption a little bit
closer.

There’s so much I still don’t know.

There’s still so much inside me that I’ll
never get to show you.

There are so many poems underneath my
ribs I’ll have to hold inside as secrets.

I’ve made my peace with this.

But I want to know that when you teach
your children of the beauty of love
one day, you’ll think of me and all
of the things that we wanted to but
couldn’t be.

I want to know that even then when the
memory of me is lying deep within the
debris of your youth, you’ll still think
of me when you speak of intimacy.

But still some nights I’m kept awake with
the fear that you might have never been as
near as I thought you were.

Or that you might have been just a ghost.

An illusion at most.

Woman

To my yet-to-be-conceived daughter.

When they tell you that you have a void in your pants in place of your independence, you will tell them that your independence lies in the creases of your fingertips and at the tip of your tongue.

When they tell you that there’s a bulge in your chest in place of your freedom, you will tell them that freedom beats at a steady lub dub  beneath your ribs.

When they tell you that you are a forbidden entity and bound you to chains shaped by their sick society, you will tell them you are as holy as a baby’s first breath.

When they tell you that you are one third of your male counterpart, you will tell them that your head will always be held as high as your brothers’.

Never lower.

Never sheepish, never hesitant.

You will be stronger than a lightening bolt. You will not be blind. You will wave away diamond rings and find your own shine. You will marry your dreams and solemnly swear I do to the stars nestled behind your eyelids. You will be fearless.

Your passionate nature will not disable you. The length of your hair will not define you. The curves of your silhouette will not make or unmake you. Your voice will be as loud as a lioness’s roar. Your hands will always keep slaving away for more. For better.

You will be better. You will not be afraid; you will not depend on luck or your ancestors’ names. You will not be degraded; you will not stand down. You will make something of yourself and always stand your ground. You will never know what it means to be thought of as “less”

- like I did. Like my mother and my sisters did.

My little girl, promise me that you will never be silenced. Swear that you will never allow your tribe’s honor to burden your back. And when the whole world rests on your shoulders, never allow your knees to kiss the floor. Invite it in wholly. Let it sink into your skin. It will disappear in shame once it sees the universes you hold within.

I don’t know you yet. And we may never get to meet.

But I know that if you come to be, you will get to bathe in your own brilliance. You will dress yourself in grace. You will care more about your future than the color of your nails.

I will watch you soar up into the sky using wings you’ve built up all on your own. You will show everyone that there is wisdom in your voice; not shame, and that there is beauty in your face; not disgrace. I will build you up with bricks I’ve had thrown at my face.

I will teach you to be human. I will teach you to be kind.

I will give you all the strength in me that I have had to hide.

You
will
be
    divine.

And when they feed you hideous lies, darling, and when they tell you that you are a diamond or a pearl in their eyes, tell them that’s not what you want to be.

Tell them your mother taught you that you are a woman.