My love,

I left my home and traveled half way across the world because suddenly a city of 8 million seemed like a crowded room, me at the bar, poison glistening in my glass and you across the floor asking someone else for the last dance.

I haunted the places I knew you would visit just to see if your feet would betray you and your fingers pressed between my ribs, your warm breath brushing my ears, the ink of your eyelashes leaving shadows on my face as we face the last kiss, and the last kiss (and the last kiss after the last kiss).

These days my bones feel like old ruins crumbling atop an abandoned hill covered with history’s muddy foot prints. I collect memories of you like sea shells off a shore, broken and useless, crowding up a glass jar. 

And I’m sorry I lied to you; I don’t love like normal people love. Love is swallowing ground glass and walking on fire and leaping off a cliff with wild abandon and pointing at a destination on a map with my eyes closed and hoping you will be there, waiting. 

And I’m sorry that suddenly there is now a you and a me and the distance is greater between us when you’re looking at me from the other side of a glass door than the thousands of miles that currently separate us as I wander aimlessly down silent streets in alien neighbourhoods. 

And I’m sorry that I will wake up at the end of my life, any multiple of ten if you like, and I will still be carrying those sea shells in my glass jar and walking along the abandoned shores of our history, drawing, ‘I love you still, don’t you know?’ in the sand.

And I will still miss you like my left arm lost in a war and write letters to you that begin with My Love and fill them with ghost stories.

I once told you that some people are like oceans, you can drown in them. I never did learn to swim.

Phantom Limb

“Love, he said”

The very first time you told me ‘I love you’
I didn’t know what you were saying
I only got a C in French
The night you left me for the last time
I sat outside, in the middle of the night
On a lonely bench
Wishing I could speak your language
Love, you said, isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be
Love, I said, is all that I need to breathe
See, I have a growing list
Of all that I miss
I stare off into space remembering your smile
Or the way your fingers played Mozart along my spine
I used to draw constellations between your shoulder blades
And make expeditions with my eyes across your face
Now when my fingers grasp across the pillow they only come up with empty space
Love, you said, isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be
Love, I said you’re the only thing I need - I need you
The way the sky needs the ocean
And the birds need the trees
I didn’t know how to breathe
Before the first time you kissed me
I love the way you said my name
In your funny little accent
It was on our first date
And between those two syllables
I knew I was ruined, I have never been the same
These mornings I watch a trail of acute memories pile up inside my front door
My mind is a cemetery of feelings forever buried,
“Here lies love. Who learned to let go.”
We made love each time we held hands
We created a universe
And between you and me we encompassed
The promised land
Love, you said, why do you take everything so literal?
Love, I said, the thing about heartbreak is that it’s terminal
Today, I cried so hard the bus driver let me on for free
And the old lady at the front moved aside to offer me her seat
“What’s the matter my love?” she asked
I said, “The atoms in him collided with the atoms in me 
and it was the last dying wish of a star”
And all she could offer me in comfort was a sweet
As she got lost in her thoughts 
Remembering how she fought
Over her own love lost in her youth’s summer heat
And all I wanted was to reach home
Instead, I sat on that bus and wrote this break-up poem
I still write your name in the sand, in my alphabet soup and the foggy window pane
And I’d sooner face a hurricane
And get drenched in November rain
Than have you forget my name
Love, you said, even if I live to die at 98, I will wait for you at heaven’s gate
Love, I said, I don’t believe in fate but I believe you’re my soulmate
This doesn’t quite feel like goodbye
Because I feel like we’ve lived a thousand lives
And found each other each and every time
So I will press you like flowers between the pages of my mind
So here is my love song, here is my ode
To a love Shakespeare wrote sonnets about 
Before we were even born
Love, you said, isn't all that it's cracked up to be
Lover, I said, come back to me.


'Love, he said'

I folded all the corners of my soul
and tucked away the lines
so you would not cut yourself over the sharp edges

I held my words in the cradle of my jaw
until my mouth felt heavy
with each syllable, thick and bitter, that I swallowed

I peeled away each layer so that I was raw
the shape of me coming undone 
to reveal the bare bones and the ugliness within

I spilled like ink across your skin
and turned into an ocean
so that you would be the island on whose shores I would sink

I folded a thousand paper cranes 
and placed them at your feet
for that one wish you were never going to grant me

"Origami"

I was born on 16th March 1988.
On that day, as napalm bombs dropped on the people of Halabcha
My mother was suffering a different kind of pain entirely
As her entire body was wracked with contractions, I fought to breathe outside of the confines of her body and so did thousands of people gasp and wheeze, clawing at their skin as poison filled the crimson chambers of their lungs and I plunged headfirst into this world, my cries joining the cacophony of a thousand screams and I knew with the certainty of those dying that I, too, had come into this world to die.
That was my first exorcism.
The second came as I was snatched from the womb of my mother land by the noose that had my father hanged and that hung over our heads like a death sentence.
See, I spoke with a funny accent. An Iraqi refugee whose colour is all wrong, the child who stalked like an alien in the corner of the playground watching the miniature soldiers who in a few years time will go to liberate her people.
Fast forward September 11 2001 and as screams rose like steam out of the burning steel mausoleum of the twin towers, mothers in a land American soldiers knew not the name of cried over the future graves and empty cradles of their young sons. 
Suddenly eyes on the street will strip search me for the guilt I hide in the folds of my Iraqi flesh ready to explode while these vigilantes drive cars to work that run on Iraqi blood. And I am the terrorist. 
Men of supposed honour wage war against widows who carry the limp, bullet ridden bodies of their children and lay them down on the burning sand as a prize. Look what your democracy and liberation has bought you: a land where trees grow on graves and blood runs through their veins, spilling rusty leaves in the autumn breeze. The sounds of shrapnel exploding in the night sky like a lullaby drowning the shrieks of orphaned kids in Baghdad, "Mama, mama, wen inti?" they cry navigating the debris of democracy. And they are the terrorists.
So pardon me if I don't buy into your war against terrorism as you hold us at gun point and rape our daughters and line our sons in front of tanks in your search for weapons of mass destruction. As you neatly sign the papers and deliver body parts in body bags expecting us to rejoice in our freedom.
The colour of my skin does not allow you to play connect the dots with the bullet holes that ravage me from head to toe. My home is not a piece of square on a monopoly board that you can claim as your own. My basic human rights are not something I have to win in the lottery of privilege. My existence is not a filler for everything villanous. 
I do not need your war terrorising me under the pretense of liberation. I am free. I am Iraqi. 

Nadalalala