After love My body is like a country After war I touch your pictures on my phone like it were your skin. That’s a lie. I have no reverence for my phone. For you, there is all that – wonder and awe, trapped words and a choking that belies how deeply you move me. I…
Category: What we say to one another
Ideas, expressions, feelings, explanations, theories, confessions, hellos and goodbyes – between me and whoever.
Let me write you poems you’d hide from your husband
I am waiting for the disaster – for the inevitable – to happen to me.It sounds terrible: the way a tragedy | travesty | catastrophe is terrible. But on some days just the cataclysm you need. I hear beautiful things happen in collision-collusion: accidents can be serendipity.Bumping into past lives, new love, exes, tomorrows. Running…
If you are looking for a sign, this is not a sign.
This is an emergency. Moments of startling clarity and then, nothing. Days spent with you a fog in my brain. My mouth full of sounds that mean nothing in a room where silence reigns. I am collecting words like memories because my words and I, we don’t speak anymore. You’re no longer here and there…
Whatever I have, it is something else I want.
Cold nights these. I love the cold, until it is cold, then I crave the warmth. When the sun comes out like a drag queen on stage, I am praying for rain. Whatever I have, it is something else I want. And this is what unhappiness is made of. It is December. I wrap myself…
Almost Holy
The longing for you is almost holy. Warm you sleep; your eyelids closing are the night coming for me. Inescapable love of lives, my lingering ache is the origami crane tucked in your breast. Doing undoing wills and possibilities: with each breath, life raises itself and with every exhale it returns. As it is with all…
Vulnerability is my superpower
Day One: Lately, I find myself gravitating towards the music of women, books written by women, the poetry of women, women-centred films, information about and by women. I find my world become calmer. Stronger. More inspired. Hope flowers. Day Two: Do you remember reading that thing saying, “Do one thing every day that scares…
Postcards from Istanbul /9
“You are always my concern. Nothing has happened to me to make me suddenly think more intensely of you… you, beautiful things and gloomy things are spread over my fleeting days” – Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan May 1949 (unreceived letter) Mosaics are works of art comprising thousands of broken pieces. They are perfect symbols…
Postcards from Istanbul /8
“She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.” – Graham Greene, ‘The Living Room” What a difference a smile makes. How it shifts landscapes and ruins the topography of the heart. And how it does and undoes the shoelaces of our reserve, our restraint, and…
My body sends you letters
I miss you. From the rumble inside my gut I miss you. From the wince and gasping ache for your heat, I miss you. From between my tendons, from the twitch of my muscle, from the creak of my aging bones, I miss you. From the soft dark of my hot heart, the steady rise…
part-broken, part-whole 