ORPHEUS Mold blooms on the yogurt, furring the edges in ancient colors. My body is something I have worn for other people. Even five years ago I would not recognize myself today, married, gallon bags of animal bone and corncobs in the freezer to boil for stock. I am far away from the cities of my girlhood, cool concrete of their stairwells. The new therapist wants a list of compliments I'd give myself on behalf of those who love me, and all I can come up with is resourceful . For a time I believed myself in love with Orpheus, which only meant I loved what I could make if I were free from what happened to my body. That man who would never touch me, kept distant and without danger by the barriers of fiction. Then I believed the work would save me. I have no real use now for those Greek myths, their dead girls, women raped by men and animals. Today the door is locked. Today nobody is outside. Muscle cramping mid-lap in the dark blue water. Now I embroider flowers in dim colors in my new country of flowers, clumsy stitches through the stencil of an orchid, remembering my younger mouth pressed to a flute, unable to release the breath. I'd liked that he was a musician, fingers long as spring onions. As a child I ruined my sweaters, the sleeves tugged down to cover my hand before touching any doorknob or handling coins. Teenaged, loitering, urgently lonely. The cotton t-shirts curled at their sliced hems. Now I am thick-fingered and practical as my mother and her mother, smell of bleach against ceramic. Gone is L's humid little apartment, violent stain on the bathroom tile, a bottle of crimson nail-polish shattered long ago and leaving streaks like blood. Her dirty living room where I slept for nights on end, though my own apartment was nearby, cleaner-- I can't imagine them, the poems that softened the hearts of gods, the poems that changed anything. That night, metal of the fire escape against my bare legs, I accepted my first cigarette and she allowed me to tell the entire story without using the real words. The night cooling and gathered close. The way nothing ever feels truly clean in summer. And all I know about Eurydice is that she died. My every other fact about her is about him. YASMEEN i was born i was planted at the rupture the root where land became ocean became land anew i split from my parallel self i split from its shape refusing root in my fallow mouth the girl i also could have been cleaving my life neatly & her name / easy / i know the story & my name / taken from a dead woman all her life / my mother wanted to remember / to fill an aperture with a girl named for a flower cut jasmine in a bowl whose oil scents all our longing our mothers / our mothers' petals wrung wilting for their perfume garlands hanging from our necks POMEGRANATE Because I am their daughter my body is not mine. I was raised like fruit, unpeeled & then peeled. Raised to bleed in some man's bed. I was given my name & with it my instructions. Pure. Pure. & is it wasted on me? Every moment I do not touch myself, every moment I leave my body on its back to be a wife while I go somewhere above the room. I return to the soil & search. I know it's there. Buried shallow, wrapped in rags dark with old & forgotten rust, their discarded part. Buried without ceremony, buried like fallen seeds. I wonder about the trees: Date palms veined through the fruit with the copper taste of cutting. Guavas that, when slit, purple dark as raw meat. I have to wonder, of course, about the blood orange, about the pomegranate, splayed open, like something that once was alive & remains. Excerpted from Girls That Never Die: Poems by Safia Elhillo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
