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.
Author: 7ala Abdullah
Hala Abdullah is a poet and a feminist from Saudi Arabia. She has founded and is currently the co-president of the Writing Club in Riyadh - a project that aims to help young men and women find their voice through writing.
For the one who’s 7,433 miles away
Remember me like this;
digging my nails into my
palms in search of all
the words that escape me,
gritting my teeth in hopes
that the right vocabulary
will eventually save me.
Remember me like this;
rummaging through tragedies
looking for hidden pieces
of me, dissecting catastrophes
in search of subtle beauty.
Remember me like this;
lips seeking refuge beneath
my teeth whenever they
resist the urge to speak,
tongue tapping melodies onto
skin until I forget how to
breathe.
Remember me like this;
palms always open and
welcoming, but never really
knowing how to receive things
gracefully.
Remember all of this, and
how I forget my
strengths sometimes.
Remember how I always hated
that my silence was a far more
articulate speaker than I,
remember how I always
wore my loneliness with my
head held high.
Remember how my passions
always turned my palms into
fists.
When I’m gone, please
only remember me like
this.
To My Father
He calls me ten times a day just to make
sure that I am still alive and sometimes
when he has to leave for days at a time
he doesn’t call at all because he’s
filled with guilt at the fact that he’s
not near me. And when he cannot sleep
he’ll ask me to rub his back because
‘your hands always put me to sleep
it’s like you’ve got magic in your fingers’
but all the magic I’ve ever known has
come from his hands, and this
man is as soft as silk but he’s always
been the strongest man I know and his
heart’s so full of goodness I wonder
how his human body can fathom it so
most days, I don’t even think he’s
human; just kindness. Just beauty.
He charges me kisses for money and
says he forgets his own name if I’m
not around him, says ‘how can I
remember anything if you’re not here’
so he’s always here making jokes
and laughing like he hasn’t got
the weight of the world on his back
and when the sickness pushes against
his chest; he is God’s exaggeration,
he is a super hero dressed in my
baba’s suit, all strength and
determination and no hint of submission
and I know his heart of gold gets heavy
sometimes and I know he’s tired but he
tells me that he loves me even though
he was raised to never say it out loud
so I’ll call him a rebel
and tell him it’s genetic and that’s
why I get into trouble sometimes but
even when I do, he says I make him
proud and no one’s got it as good as he.
And I am teaching him to linger when he
hugs me and he is teaching me to be
patient and kind and giving and he’s always
giving without asking for anything
back and so I love him with every
word that falls off my tongue
and I love him with all the kisses
I lay on his forehead before I go
to sleep.
They tell me that heaven lies
under my mother’s feet but I find it
resting quietly also in his
heart.
Protected: letters to my former selves
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.
Solecisms 