It doesn’t matter where you land
an oil spill for a road.
All the wrong colors
to lend a breath
on land you never
felt your own.
Remember falling through this world
is a world in itself.
Stay there and play in the mud.
Scatter it everywhere and forget where it fell.
Maybe one day it will catch your feet
drowning into a familiar pose
or bring you back to tomorrow.
A mirage is two sunsets away and all around you
all at once.
Being someplace is the reflection of
your absence somewhere else.
Streams stop running only
when they are streams no more.
Because healing and hurting are separated by the direction
the wind blows through
bullet holes your motherland wears
around her neck.
Teaching your grandmother
to say good bye
in three different languages
at the age of four
a virgin with a memory.
A tongue without a mouth hears
its echo
turn into the marrow
of unformed tongues.
A jasmine vine plucked
to swallow the syrup out
of detached stems
before the flick
of their scattering
is the divergence
between home and country.
And photographs yellow for you
to listen: a place is only
a place in time and nothing more.
If you stay long enough your roots
surrender water
for crevasses parched into
one another
gathering and waiting for the right temperature to burn.
NADIM CHOUFI is an Arab-Lebanese poet and a regular contributor to Middle Eastern zines. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Sukoon, Sula Collective, Jaffat El Aqlam, and elsewhere.
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