immigrantpoems

Making myself smaller Is an art It’s a Tuesday morning. I’m so sorry I’m late again, I was held hostage by my reflection. She took up so much of the mirror I had no space to leave. I hold pieces of myself in my hands as a medium. I wish I could tear it out and mould myself like clay. It’s only Tuesday and I am unfinished There are deadlines to meet. I have not yet learned how to make a portrait out of a woman. The girls around me are artisans and my hands are shaking. I just can’t get this part right and there is no rubber I am held hostage by my thoughts. They are white spirt. An hour later and I can still smell it in the air. It clings to my clothes where they bulge. Tonight, the smell will make me choke in the bathroom again while the mirror stands sentinel, it watches like a tutor and I am it’s student waiting for the paint to dry Maybe now I am an artist.

The sun had swayed into the horizon when my Mother told me from behind the tip of an iron that when she reminisces about days gone by with her friends they don’t seem to remember it like she does and she thinks its because they make new memories with each passing moon while she remains a grainy photo from 1985 illuminated by Khartoum’s city lights in standstill and I think about how she moves like a silent movie folding clothes like they're something precious and sews nostalgia into my tattered jeans and I think about how she feeds us with bits of herself piece by piece until all that remained of her were crumbs.

How do you not understand that it's not the same anymore The nectar of every whispered iloveyou that spilled from your mouth was designed to sand down my edges until I fit into a you shaped hole With every sharp toothed smile you ground me into a pill small enough to swallow dry Today you cannot do this anymore I am not yours I am me- I am me, my god, I am me and me is hard edges and sharp corners And I did not give you permission to let me forget that

I imagine my father as he was in his youth, With a vibrancy so splendid it threatened to spill from his mouth and the weight of a thousand suns at the point of his teeth I imagine my father, the hurricane blowing into this coast to carve out a space for himself and now, as he removes his teeth and all that escapes is a mournful, whistling wind I see my father, the artist forming us with pieces of his own spirit until it was present in every body except his own I find it in the arch of my sisters feet and gap between my brothers teeth And I decide that Today For a spell, I will grind him down to a dark gold stain  So he lives forever between my names