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.

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.

Elle is a Writing Club project. Learn a little bit about her here.

When we met, you told me that
you got called “bitch” about
five times a day and that it
came with the job, your ears
now numb to the agony the
daggers shooting out of everyone’s
lips meant to inflict. You
said you’d gotten to the point
where your expectations had dug
a hole so deep, it reached the
other side of the world and
that you’d wished to jump into
that hole, wished to end up
anywhere but right here.

It was that melancholy in your
eyes that reeled me in. It poked
through me like a hook and pulled
me towards you and I didn’t dare
deny its wishes. You pulled me out
of the dark realms of the ocean with
the strength of a hundred starving
fishermen and I shot out and into you.
In your eyes, I planned to create
galaxies where I would name all
the stars and planets after you.
I’ve watched them sparkle and light
up darknesses I could have never
recovered from without your aid.
Love, you wore that sadness on your
limbs like a super model but in love,
you are the most beautiful thing I
have ever laid eyes on. That night
when you’d pushed your needle
into me, you injected me with more
than just black ink, and when you
drilled it against my skin, you colored
oxygen deep into my lifeless arteries,
you inking your exquisite name across
my veins without my approval. Every pore
of my flesh fell in love with your
touch, my love. Love, I knew from the
moment I met you that this is where
I wanted us to end up. I wanted
you, and I was broken in a way that left
nothing in me whole enough to be halved
again, so I wished and I waited,
– arms extended and heart as heavy
as silence – for the moment you’d smash
into me hard enough for all my pieces to be
called together again, to be pulled together
again by your illustrious grace.

And now I stand here before you, and
my Elle, I take you – ink under my skin
and burn burn burn in my heart. Every
inch of my skin will tell our story.
This is my body, and this is your canvas.

Use my skin to tell the world everything
you want about us.

I want you fire-eyed, helpless,
and passion-driven.
I want you irrational and guilt-stricken.
I want you spiteful,
conflicted,
loving,
I want you going, coming, and running.
I want you heaving, shoving, screaming, sighing,
pulling, pushing, laughing, lying.
I want you holding my face in the palms of
your hands and crying

    I don’t want to want you,

    but I really do.

I want that fire in your eyes to
turn a dull shade of blue
every time you get your saddened hands to
wave good-bye.
I want you finding that weak spot
on my shoulder without having to try
and giggling like a child
on a sugar high,
I want to kiss away your shy side
until darkness
is no longer necessary
for you and I
to lock eyes.
My blinding light,
I want you toes curling
and tongue-tied,
I want you realizing
I’ve set your vocal chords
free,
as you bite into the sheets
to muffle your screams,
I want you doing those things
you said you wished you could do to me,
I want you shaky-kneed
breathing
please stay
    don’t leave
right into my mouth,
where only I can taste you
and hear you.
I want to guide you, and steer you
into the gates of hell where the
flames themselves will blister
from the burning fire that is
the two of us,
I want you to call us “us”
and savor the sweetness of the word
before you smack your own lips
at your carelessness.
My heaven-sent,
I want to tell you how I think
your hypnotizing hips
are actually made of God’s
favorite symphony, and when it’s played,
how I’m certain that the whole universe
fucking bows and breaks at your
divinity,
I want you to break me
the way you do every time you feel like
solving me,
the way you piece back a goddamn puzzle.

I don’t know how you put me back together.
I’m the girl who confessed her cynicism
at “forever”,
I’m the girl who promised never to pen any love-letters,
and this again is not a letter,
this is a confession of sleep-deprived hands that
didn’t know any better,
these are the silent whisperings of fingers whose tips
have grown addicted to the feel of the insides of your lips.
My lover,
I tasted melancholy on your shoulder
that night I held you against my chest
and begged the sky
to either grant me another kiss
before I lose myself to this restlessness
or just shake the heaviness in my breath
that comes with the very mention of your glorious name.
My never again,
you asked me not to leave any traces
of this sweet sin on your honey-dipped skin,
so instead I bit my tongue and poured my blues
into your morning coffee
and never told you why that last breakfast
had your chest so heavy and full of aching.

I hope that secret hickey I left on the walls
of your heart
stays put.

Dear Words,

I am writing through you to you because
you are the only things that are capable of making a poet
fall to her knees –
and I
don’t claim to be a poet
in a way
Wordsworth or Plath
would approve of,
but my knees are scuffed and bloody for you,
and because of you.
     Words, I found you in the darkness
when all I needed was something to
sink my teeth into, when all I wanted
was something to dig my nails
in night after night

but you clogged my arteries,
and you traveled up my spine like chills;

tugging at the very fibers of my existence,
and you made sure to seduce me when
all I had
to pride myself with was my
independence –
when I was the queen of avoiding attachment
to strings that dangled so persistently before my eyes,
and yet I soon found your threads
forming webs all over and around me,
claiming me victim,
claiming the start of a one-sided
addiction and dependency.
My dear words, all you desired was to
seep out
of my ink-blotted pores and into these
beautiful and naked
pages of books I called my second skin –
and all I wanted was to keep you inside me,
to keep you rolling over and under my tongue,
until I memorized the way you tasted,
until I could confidently say
I knew you well.
But these gracious pieces of paper were
always more than just silent leaves
where I left you to rest;

they were crime scenes.

They were incriminating evidence of nights I laid my body atop
these notebooks and was stabbed by the need to
exorcise these phrases from my soul until
I bled black ink
in the shape of letters.
But you shaped me unsatisfied
and you stabbed me only when you pleased,
and you promised me solace
each time, but you always just left me there
on my knees.
Me
on the floor
with remnants of the alphabet
under my nails and unworded stories hiding
under my bones. Every time I tried to breathe them
out and pull them into the light,
I always found more of you than I originally anticipated.

Like ribbons from a clown’s lips,

I could never guess the colors or
the damage you’ll do or undo to me.
But you keep leaving me with eyes like
neon signs screaming

 “This is not enough; this is never enough”.

Always wanting more;
always needing that one last verse or that
one last stanza to complete me. Some twisted
love affair we’ve had, you made me whole only
to make me feel more hollow.  I’ve always been fascinated at how
that intense and electrifying sense of ecstasy
you bestow so generously upon me
flees away so hastily before I can fully drink it down.
But I’ll still ask you to keep driving me to insanity,
words – I will beg of you.
Because, my words, you’ll always find a way to
make me sane again.

If only for a little while.

Forever your lover,
forever your obedient slave,

Hala.