A Clarification

I was split in two, a question planted at my waist. I spent six months feeling torn.

My mind was assuring me that I’d just escaped. My heart was saying, No, you perished.

During those months I grew less rigid. My heart started to reject my excuses, one after the other. If he was a bad guy, if he was a ‘wolf,’ the insult wouldn’t have hurt him. I’d blocked him with the point of my pen, with a precise hit right where it would hurt the most: his poem.

My caution had won out, even though inside I was starved for his words. All men were suspect, that’s what Saqr said. Every man was a ‘wolf’ and every girl a ‘sheep.’ Caution was necessary. In the end, my older brother might be right.

In those dark, solitary nights, I started gazing into the gloom around me and reviving the memory, setting aside some tenderness as provisions for the future. I wondered if he was thinking about me too, if he still remembered me, if, despite my presumptuousness and my silence, I meant to him what he meant to me.

It was all the beauty and tenderness I could have hoped for in this barren life. Despite my obstinacy, my refusal, and my stubbornness, I didn’t doubt that for a moment. I found myself hugging my pillow tightly while reliving the day I met him, the day he read his poem and his eyes looked into the depths of my soul, those frighteningly deep eyes. A night of music and secrets, emptied into my soul.

I thought about him every day for six months, until I felt that I knew him. I read his letters over and over and felt so happy. I relaxed. The thick skin that protected me from the world fell away. It’s okay if you let your guard down just a bit, I told myself. If I took a risk and exposed myself to another blow, what did I have to lose?

Every time I read his odd question about the color of my ears when I get mad I felt like the luckiest girl. For years I’d lived in this house without anyone caring what I felt, what I needed, if I had dinner before I went to bed or not. Now this strange man came and asked me about something I didn’t know myself. Do my ears get red when I’m mad?

The man was so interested in me that he’d studied me, dissected me inside and out, something that exceeded my wildest fantasies. I closed my eyes and imagined him over and over, little pieces torn from a picture: his hand holding the doorknob, the sweat on his brow, an eyelash on a cheek, a scar on the eyebrow and a scab on the right knee, a slight limp, black coffee. Many things—I wasn’t sure if I’d made them up or seen them with my own eyes.

Six months went by with me holding on to him inside me, like a secret, like a sin, like a poem, like the one thing that made life possible. I hid him in my eyelids, provisions for my soul, and whenever the world got too nasty, I’d take him out of the pocket of my heart, like a talisman.

I could have been satisfied with what I’d had, a quick succession of letters, a relationship that ended before it began, with the electricity in my body, the narcotic buzz at the edge of poetry. I could have been satisfied, I could have thanked God for giving me five messages that made me believe life could be different.

Six months went by.

 

Isam:

Listen to this story.

This is the story of a poet who decided to write a story. Because he doesn’t know how to write stories, he’s going to say to you what his grandmother said to him: once upon a time.

Once upon a time there was a poet who decided to write a story.

He’s writing it now.

Once there was a poet no one read, a poet no one saw. He decided to participate in a silly event and sit on a silly stage. That day, poetry got confused with pottery. The poet was unseen and paying the price of his idiotic decisions in a seven-meter-square seminar room at a university. There were eleven people, ten of whom the poet didn’t see. He just saw one, only one, the one who saw him, the one who made him seen.

From that moment, the story has had another character.

Now we have the poet and the one.

The poet read his poem, and he felt something that hadn’t happened before—that the words were coming out of his mouth and taking form in the space around him. They had height and width and length, scent and meaning and music. He saw, to his great wonder, the words of his story flowing down the cheek of the one and settling in the pores of her skin. He saw that his words were more comfortable with her than they were with him, she loved them more than he, they flew to her, they sat on her fingertips, nestled in her eyelashes, refusing to leave. For the first time, the poet saw that the words that left him didn’t die, but were reborn. He was finally convinced that he was who he thought he was, and for the first time in his life he believed the voice inside him that told him he was a poet.

The one approached the poet after the people had left, and even though she didn’t say anything special, he felt the whole universe was on his side. It was giving him the one who made him seen and a poet at once. He was sure of himself, very sure, because he saw it as a sign that the world was on his side for the first time and was giving him something he wanted, giving him the one. When he found out that the one was a poet, he thought it was too good to be true, and said he had to see it with his own eyes. When she sent him a poem she’d written, just four lines long, he could sense deep caves within her, tugging at his ears to enter, and said to himself, She’s not just pretty, she writes poetry that is like a knife.

It’s true, the poet thinks the one is pretty. Now, after this silly clarification, let’s finish the story.

The one didn’t expect the poet to make such silly, clownish leaps, to write to her as if he’s known her for years, longed to know her for years. She’s right, it’s not logical. She thought that the poet was exaggerating and lying. When did you suffer so? she asked. When?

It seems she didn’t pay close enough attention to him. He’s a poet and doesn’t need a long time to understand the things he’s drawn to. But he sent her silly stuff, thinking he was being funny. He did things wrong, even though his intentions were very good, and today he’s writing this story, his story, after six months of obstinacy and stubbornness, to say one thing: I’m sorry, Fatima.

 

Isam

 

Fatima:

Dear Isam,

I don’t know if anger makes my ears turn red.

I’d nearly forgotten I have ears.

I don’t break dishes,

Or wash them.

When my face breaks in the mirror,

I feel my insides are out.

 

The glass vessel of my spirit is cracked.

Writing is a glue:

It pulls me together,

Saves me just in time,

And leaves me to perish.

 

I just write.

I write my slight poems on the bottom of a box of tissues,

A precautionary measure against any attack on my notebook.

The things I write are like me,

I am out of tune.

 

Isam:

Dear Fatima,

A small vein on my thumb swelled from writing so much. Then it divided in two and became something resembling the place where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. Since that day I’ve been happy with the Iraqi river on my finger. I raise it to the world and call out to the gulf: “O Gulf! O giver of shells and death.” Al-Sayyab swells in my blood.

When I do that, my mother laughs. My father says, The boy’s gone mad.

I say to him, “And if the boy were a stone?”

 

I write on unlined paper,

I shake the rhymes loose,

I step on the meter of poetry and celebrate its pure glow.

 

My question for you today is:

Have you always written your poetry like this, flowing and loose?

 

Good morning, Fatima.

 

Fatima:

Good morning, Isam.

On the table where I sit now there’s a computer screen, a ripe banana, books with their covers torn off, antibacterial wipes, cracker crumbs, and a dead ant. If things can be like this, comfortable with their strangeness, having no problem being next to each other despite all their differences, then I want my writing to be like this table. The world deconstructed and confused.

 

Rhyme and meter are not because of my confusion or fragility.

I break into pieces along the lines, trembling as
I walk.

The poetry I know does not resemble poetry as generally recognized;

It’s more ambiguous.

 

Once when my brother read a line of Baudelaire

He laughed out loud and asked, So this is the latest thing now?

 

He’s right.

I belong to the last latest thing.

The thing five minutes before the world ends.

The poetry I write is like the seedling you plant before the final hour.

My brother still curses cars and praises the camel.

I don’t know which of us is right.

 

Yes, I’ve always written like this.

Whenever the cell closes in, the poem expands.

 

Isam:

Good evening, Fatima.

I know a poet who wrote his memoirs in prison and smuggled them out in his underwear. Later he discovered that what he’d written was poetry. I don’t know him, as in know him, I’ve just read everything he wrote, this poet who discovered poetry like Newton discovered the laws of gravity. Have you heard of him? Muhammad al-Maghout, his fear and his poetry? You seem to be like him, Fatima.

It frightens me that you’re so real that you find inside yourself poems in their most primal form. You write as though extending your hand to the forbidden tree, evoking the tragedy of the first man, his fall and fright.

As for me, I’ve always had to repeat the words of Suzanne Bernard and Baudelaire, to memorize Rimbaud’s “Letters of the Seer,” to cite Ounsi al-Hajj and Qasim Haddad. I’ve always had to justify the chaotic form of my poems, for there are, it seems, rights to everything, even poetry.

I searched for my supposed ‘legitimacy’ in the wrong world, trying to convince people who don’t read that poetry can exist anywhere, even in prose.

You, Fatima, didn’t have to do any of that, you write your essence, you discovered for yourself, from your cell, that your heart is the philosopher’s stone.

By the way . . . when you say ‘cell,’ do you mean a cell? A prison cell?

 

Fatima:

Cell Block No. 13

Between Zayd’s cell and Amr’s cell.

Because those characters from our grammar books

are still hitting each other. . . .

 

There’s a fan hanging from the ceiling

by a noose.

No one thought of giving it

a proper funeral.

We also have

a Mitsubishi air conditioner

drooling on the wall.

The wall doesn’t mind;

it’s just getting full of cracks.

 

My books are naked.

I ripped off their skin,

promising to cover them with floral wrapping paper,

which I never did.

 

Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural

has been covered with white printer paper.

On the sticker I wrote:

“Introduction to Automated Systems 101.”

 

At 9 p.m.

I have to turn off the computer

until the sun rises.

My brother says

that’s when the devils come

to computers with the lights on.

Because cyberspace

turns into a bar.

I say to myself:

If I were Cinderella

I would have three more hours

until the spell is broken

and the ball ends.

 

I am not Cinderella.

 

When I say ‘cell,’

this is exactly what I mean:

a prison cell . . .

“Big Brother is watching you.”

 

Isam:

It’s one in the morning.

Fatima, where are you?

I’m weak, wasted, the cold is killing me.

Where did you go? Are you asleep? How can you sleep like this?

Are you dreaming? Of whom? What about me, traitor?

 

How do you look when you’re sleeping? Do you rest your forearm over your eyes? Do you leave your mouth half open? Do your eyelids flutter? Do you leave your top button open? Do you sleep on your right side or your left, or on your stomach? How do you look right now? Tell me!

I want to be more than I am. I need to sneak in through the air-conditioning vents, dig a trench with a spoon, a trench so I can reach you, sit on the side of your bed and look at you, at your fluttering eyelids, I really must see how your eyelids flutter. I want to take you all in, Fatima.

 

I’m thinking about you and you’re asleep, the acids burning my stomach.

The world is unjust. I’m thirsty and hungry and can’t sleep, Fatima, and you’re asleep.

It’s not fair for me to be here and you there.

Damn you.

 

Isam:

It’s four in the morning.

I wanted to tell you I still haven’t slept.

 

Isam:

Six in the morning.

I read our twenty messages over and over.

Am I Don Quixote?

 

Fatima:

It’s 7 a.m., I don’t have much time.

My first class begins at eight and I have to hurry.

I just wanted to tell you that, like you, I didn’t sleep,

But I’m not complaining or cursing.

I’m grateful for my insomnia.

Good morning, Poet.

 

Isam:

I don’t know what has come over me.

I have some kind of disorder.

I’m no longer satisfied with a message. I wait for you in front of this computer for hours, and hate that I’m waiting for you.

Tell me about your day, tell me about you.

There are a lot of details missing from the picture. I need you to fill in the blanks, so I can understand what’s going on inside me.

 

I need to know more than your name. What do you study? What’s your favorite toothpaste? How do you feel about earthworms? What TV shows do you watch? Do you write on paper or type directly onto the computer?

Do you have a pair of orange pajamas? I’ve had this damn pair of orange pajamas stuck in my head since yesterday, where did they come from? Tell me.

Do your hands smell like mint? Cardamom? Oud? Musk? Bouillon? Anything. What’s your favorite perfume, so I can buy it, so I can pour it on my pillow, so I can love whoever made it. So I can be jealous of him. Kill him.

 

There are so, so many blanks. Be nice and fill them in for me. Come on.

 

Fatima:

I’m less than you think.

I am full of blanks, all across and down,

A chessboard.

 

Every time you do something nice,

The uglier the world seems.

 

I’m afraid to get used to you. Afraid I won’t.

 

Isam:

I was watching a movie.

The movie was about a sailor.

The sailor took a map out of a drawer and put it on the table.

The map folded back up into itself.

I’ve figured it out, Fatima.

You’re a map.

Why do maps fold up into themselves?

That’s what I’m going to find out.

I’m a sailor.

 

Isam:

“Fatima, O dust of the stars, you left me

Carousing with them all night—and, you, without regret.

 

Let me drink from the milk of your mouth, lost,

This one whose heart circles the spring.

 

Were it not for the impossible, you’d not find me here,

Cut off, thirsting for you, the girl named Fatima.”

 

Isam:

Fatima,

Just how much can a poet love you—

Say, “I love you”—

Without you curling up into yourself

Like this?

 

Fatima:

Just how much can a person stare into the abyss?

 

We shouldn’t let love happen.

Love is a crime, and a punishment.

A punishment for what? For the crime of allowing love to happen. How can a sin like this be allowed to occur, to pollute the place, muddy its purity, and draw it out of its compulsory monasticism and self-denial, its unbearable emptiness?

Love is life’s response to life. Life’s response to the voice inside. Life’s nature is to live.

How can love not be a crime when it is a response to a call? A rebellious revolt against nonexistence, a response to life’s lowly flower despite its inevitable end and its pitiable shortness of years.

How could we allow it?

“Of Love—may God exalt you . . .”

Don’t bother, Ibn Hazm. They don’t read.

 

Isam:

Good evening, Lovely,

Today I got a call from the writers’ group. They never stop sending invitations or holding readings or planning more and more poetry nights. We have dozens of writers’ groups in Kuwait, and no readers. Depressed by your disconcerting reply, I told myself that I’d go to today’s meeting. Maybe I’d remember what the world was like before you. Maybe I’d love you less.

Sitting there, mug in hand, my coffee black the way I like it, my whole body sunk deep into the leather couch at our usual café, The Coffee Bean. I listened, bored with that meaningless and unending discussion about the legitimacy and illegitimacy of the prose poem. Everyone was holding a book of poetry by Dorianne Laux in their hand, and Dorianne Laux was bored and sad like me.

I realized that I was no longer myself. This subject in particular, that I used to swim in with all my critical muscle and everything I’ve ever read, was no longer at all appealing. Poetry was real to me in a way it hadn’t been before, and real things don’t need official recognition from the relevant authorities.

If only Fatima were here, I thought, with me, in this chair next to me. If only she were sitting on my right, shy and withdrawn, working hard to hide the universe in her heart. What if you were next to me, Fatima? What if our knees touched accidentally—or perhaps intentionally? What if I could get through this fake icy shell in which you wrap your true presence? If only. If only.

My hand shook and my coffee flew in the air.

My shirt will testify to my guilt.

 

Fatima:

I have an hour before the internet is turned off.

This is the last thing I’ll write to you today.

Here in cell block No. 13 the guards have started to notice something different about me, something I failed to attend to. Did I tell you about the guards before? About the poem patrol? About the campaign to send the poem to the gallows, about the regime’s mercenaries?

I am hounded by questions. They swarm around me, float over my head like a turban of smoke. Where there is smoke there is fire, says the patrol, certain of the sin before it has been committed: what are you waiting for and why do your eyes shine like that? What is it about your walk that has changed? Why are you standing up so straight, why are you flushed?

Happiness is suspect.

 

I was dying of jealousy when I read your letter—a café, poetry, Dorianne Laux? I almost envy you.

Be grateful for the coffee and friendship and the group and Dorianne Laux. Reading the most basic things in your letter—your ability to go out, to feel bored, to join a discussion about poetry, to let your body sink into a giant couch—all of this, these beautiful things, make me feel that I am dead.

My sadness is as long

As the night that sobs in my chest.

I wish you hadn’t written to me.

I wish I hadn’t been born.

 

Isam:

I’m going to get mad at you, Fatima. I’ll get mad even if you retreat, turn, and fold up into yourself like a map, like an earthworm, like a damn hedgehog. I’ll get mad at you and for you and with you! I’ll be hard on you, out of love for you, Fatima.

Your message makes me feel I don’t know you and this makes me mad. I know we’ve only been writing to each other for a few days, but I have a right to be angry at you. I want to know all of you.

I know that I know your inner truth, your profound truth. I know your essence, and I close my eyes and imagine that I’ve worked my way into your pores, that I slip through your veins. I sit comfortably in the right pocket of your heart and feel there is nothing I don’t know about you. At the same time I know nothing about your situation, and you write to me about a “mythical tomb” and about “cell block No. 13” and about the Mitsubishi air conditioner and . . . for a moment I imagine—forgive me—that you’re speaking metaphorically. Then. Then I read you like this, so unexpectedly, in a different way. Suddenly I see another truth. I see—I see your pain, Fatima, I feel it, I hold it in my hand and feel it, hot, burning my fingers. I feel that you are in pain and still you don’t find it in you to write to me, to vent, to rest your head on my shoulder, on the shoulder of my poem.

 

I love you, Fatima, my miserable Fatima.

Further than you can go in a poem.

I’m mad.

Fatima:

Good morning, O poet,

O gulf,

O river,

Splendid giver of shells and poetry.

 

I have a class in an hour and a half.

I am a student at the Girls’ College, which is not what I wanted.

 

I will learn with you, from you, how to vent . . .

I will vent, open up, speak, disclose, complain, open my mouth.

I started today:

I’m a student at the Girls’ College and that wasn’t what I wanted.

The end.

 

Isam:

A student at the Girls’ College? Eight lines to tell me you study at the Girls’ College?

At this rate it’s going to take me three or four years to learn everything I want to know about you.

Speaking of which, I have all the time in the world for you.

We have a whole life before us.

Today’s question is:

How can you be poor at disclosure

When you’re a poet?

 

Fatima:

According to Ibn Manzur:

Disclosure is the appearance of a thing that has been concealed.

To disclose something is to make something appear, and the disclosure of something is its release.

Is that what poetry is?

 

Writing isn’t a substitute for a friend who is a good listener, or for a psychologist, or a priest who hears confessions. If Ibn al-Mulawwah only recited poems to heal himself, let’s remember, for the love of God, that the poems killed him.

Writing isn’t a way to unload anxieties; it creates and intensifies them.

Writing is greater than life; it is the surpassing of it.

Writing isn’t an allusion to a wound, it’s the ongoing creation of one.

Writing is a spiral movement toward the horizon, not sitting for long periods on the psychiatrist’s couch.

Writing is an act of listening more than one of disclosure, and is sometimes a means of listening. The text is formed, and the further you are from yourself, and wend your way toward the world that exists in you, the closer you are to being a poet.

Writing isn’t curling up,

and it isn’t spreading out.

It’s a dance between the two.

I’m poor at disclosure,

but I write poetry.

I dance.

 

Isam:

Amen.

 

What can I do with you anyway, if you’re fighting me the whole way? You impose your rules, dispense your existence into my mouth drop by drop like a drug . . .

Write your poetry, your unforgivable poetry.

Let it hang down like that, in your own way, over your heart.

Pour it out carefully,

Release it . . .

Like a stream that has rebelled against the river, and gone on singing the virtues of deviation.

 

Write your poetry, your dance, your femininity, your pain, your lament, and your song.

Write, Fatima, but . . .

Talk to me sometimes.

I’ll sit here and wait.

 

By the way,

It was a captivating dance.

 

Fatima:

I sometimes imagine that I see the world chewing on its sleeve and running barefoot. On the sand, running barefoot.

When I see it running like that, I wonder: where are its sandals? Where did it lose them? Where did it forget them? Then I understand what’s going on, what’s really going on with the world: the world took off its sandals and ran away.

I am a sandal.

 

Isam:

I am hung up on you.

You are a seed growing in the heart.

I wait, every day, with each message, each word, each letter.

I wait for you to open up, for the time to come when you appear fully in my life, like Rilke’s rose that, “petal against petal, rests within itself, inside.”

I talked to my mother about you today. I told her I’ve met a girl who is actually a poem, and that we’re writing to each other. I told her you’re the only thing that can restore what I’m missing, that she has to stop writing girls’ names down in the black book that she brings with her to all the weddings as if she’s arranging my funeral, and that she should write your name only: Fatima.

My mother asked me many things. Did you meet her in the writers’ group or at the university? What does she study? Does she wear the hijab? Is she tall or short? From the city or country? Shia or Sunni? Who are her parents and what is the name of their seventh neighbor? When I told her that I would find out those things in the next three years, given the unforgivable slowness in my ability to get to know you, she got up from the table thinking I was making fun of her.

My mother likes to put everything on the table from the start, to deal with the world “openly,” as we say. She starts throwing this and tossing that and saves a few things . . . she’s very pragmatic, unbearably practical. The only diagnosis I have for this illness is that she doesn’t read poetry.

No one can read poetry and stay practical like that, searching for the direct advantage, making paintings and poems and songs all meaningless things because they have no ‘use.’ Like it or not, we have to admit that we live in a world that doesn’t see beauty as a necessity.

My mother thinks that as long as there is no real material gain or some kind of recognition—something I have failed to achieve—I’m not good enough, and so the decision I made to study comparative literature isn’t a ‘logical’ decision. Focus on the word ‘logical’ here. Does it make you smile? I hope so.

Let’s return to my mother. My mother wants me to study accounting so I can get a government job, because the cost of living is always going up. One of her countless ways of terrorizing me is to force me to do poetry readings, saying, You have five more “shows” and if you don’t receive sufficient acclaim, it would be foolish to pursue writing any further. I am a clown in a great circus called “Literature”! Speaking of poetry, my mother only acknowledges two poets, and only has room in her memory for them: al-Mutanabbi and Nizar Qabbani. She calls what I write “gibberish poetry.” The prose poem is pure heresy, a blatant departure from the true faith, a type of literary apostasy, God forbid. A couple of days ago she called one of those hacks who writes ‘light’ poems and asked him to give me advice on writing the “correct” way. . . .

So, Fatima. Are you smiling now, like me?

Even so, I write without a grudge and with much gratefulness for what writing really is. I bring the crazy things I write to her so she can be the first one to read them, not because she loves what I write, but because it’s my way of telling her I love her.

My mother and I are different in every way, we debate all day. She takes me shopping and asks me to try on a pair of pants. In the fitting room she waits for me outside, repeating, Okay, so what did we decide about your latest poem? Are you sure about the title you chose? “Regression”? I’ve never read a poem called “Regression.” Listen, son, why don’t you write a patriotic poem? There’s an audience for those poems, as you know.

She’s harsh and kind at the same time. Her harshness is affection, and she has a strong hunger to control everything. Her problem in this world is that poetry can’t be controlled by anyone. I think she will like you a lot, Fatima, because you curl up into yourself like a secret. She’ll think you’ve surrendered, and she’ll say: this is a suitable daughter-in-law for me.

By the way, don’t you dare say something about yourself, something awful like in your last message.

Only beautiful things can be compared to you.

I love you more than your miserable mind can imagine.

I love you, silly.

I love you.

Isam

 

Fatima:

Dear Isam,

I loved every line you wrote about your mother. It made me smile several times.

Perhaps if you practice more, you’ll succeed in making me laugh.

I thought about telling you about my mother, to retrieve her from memory, before she latches onto a cloud and rises into the sky.

My mother is from Muharraq. My mother is a drop of honey on a fingertip, and everything flowing from her depths is blue. She looks like Bahrain, and the mermaids, and the gods of Dilmun.

In my childhood, on our many trips to Bahrain, the sky looked ample and close, “within arm’s reach,” as Darwish says. There were many seagulls, storks, and happy dreams.

Not a day goes by without me wondering, what am I doing here, far from my mother’s country? The blue is scarce and the air dry.

Why did my mom’s sister leave me in the care of my older brother? Why did she decide this is better for me? I don’t really understand why, Isam.

Saqr takes me to visit my aunt once a year. We stay one day then come back. On my last visit I told her that I wished to stay with her. She said, “You always have a home here, but as you see, it’s a small place. The boys have grown up, and you’re a girl.”

Enough about me. Let’s return to my mother. My mother is very beautiful, and she makes exceptional trifle, making sure to put fruit in the Jell-O. She loves lace and pearls. Before she left, she protected me from the ugliness of the world, and after she passed, I started to see boils and pits and traps in the world’s face.

When she wanted to wake me up, she’d gently crack my toes and fingers, and I’d wake up slowly. She helped me name my toys, she read me stories, and, because I asked, she covered the walls of my room with floral wallpaper that looked like wrapping paper, decorated with purple and violet flowers.

 

I don’t like the color of my walls now—it’s a wasteland of white.

I don’t like that I have to go down fourteen steps to reach the place that is mine.

A terrible place.

Still, what I wish for most these days is for my brother to get arthritis in his knees, so he’ll stop coming down those steps.

I am starving to touch the world outside. I am Rapunzel, and instead of a tower with a window I live in a windowless tomb. The computer screen is my window. Are you going to be my prince?

 

So, Isam, what have we learned from this lesson?

My parents are dead, my brother is a prison warden, and I miss Bahrain a lot.

It seems I’ve gotten better at disclosure.

Write me a lot, write me more.

Fatima

 

Isam:

I’ve been reciting the lines of al-Muthaqqib al-Abdi since yesterday. His Fatima makes him suffer wonderfully. I want to sit with him on the couch in the hall and sing: “O Fatima, before you go, give me some joy!”

 

Isam:

Fatima,

I want to see you.

The emptiness is great and my heart wails.

Come.

 

Fatima:

Since I met you, my heart is no longer mine.

I am far and you are near.

It seems we won’t stop.

 

What you’re asking for is a leap. The pit is deep and my legs are weak.

If I say no and stay like this, in your email inbox, me writing to you and you writing to me,

I would know that you’ll be mine for the rest of my life.

 

But you want more.

You want to risk a lot for a little

Because a lot is a little

And a little is more.

 

I won’t risk us.

I’m a coward and you are demanding.

Isam:

I no longer know what to say, Fatima.

I’m depleted.

I hug the pillow to my chest and go to you in my thoughts.

I’m rusted and hung up and broken

Like an old lantern.

The only thing that lights me up is you.

This writing has become agony.

Have mercy.

 

Fatima:

I read your letters, then I write them out by hand on colorful scraps of paper.

I fold the scraps into squares, tiny squares.

I hide them in glass jars,

They used to be jam jars, apricot, I think.

They prefer poetry to jam, and are happy with their new job.

 

The things you write bring me back to life,

Even though your suffering is killing me.

Talk to me about things, about colors, about scents and meanings.

I want to see the world through your eyes.

Open the door and go out now, tell me what you see.

My heart is open wide

As if a window.

Isam:

I left my room today. I did it for you. Even though my spirit, in one way or another, stayed in front of the computer screen, ill and foolish.

Can you feel me? I am gently taking hold of your hand as if I’m afraid it will break in my grasp, and wrapping it around my arm. Like a European gentleman I open the door for you so I can walk with you. Can you see the sea, Fatima? We’ll go there, you and I. We’ll take off our shoes and throw our socks in the air. Our feet will sink into the sand and our walk will wander, then we’ll go into the water. Can you feel the water, Fatima? The sea is refreshing as it touches your toes. I am jealous—you and the sea are infatuated with each other, and I . . . I suffer through it, I fake a smile, fail, I think I’ll carry you between my arms until I anger the sea. You won’t like this, of course, and the sea won’t like it, but no matter. This world is not designed entirely to please your moods. The sea has no mood, damn you both.

I’m not joking, Fatima, I spent the whole day walking with you on the beach. I was alone, and with you. You were so real it made my muscles contract and gave me goosebumps. Every few minutes I wondered, when will this miserable girl be with me?

 

I want to see you.

Even the sea wants to see you.

 

Tomorrow I’m going to stand in front of the entrance of the college,

Stubborn as a mast.

I will look at you from afar.

You’ll wave at me, if not with your hand then in your heart.

That’s my faintest hope and far less than I deserve.

The end.

 

Fatima:

Let’s pretend—for the sake of argument or bluff—that there’s hope of some kind of meeting.

With a slap of the hands,

Contact that awakens the electricity in our veins.

 

Let’s suppose—comically, hopefully—that a meeting like this

Isn’t impossible,

That we can linger on the sidewalk without owning what we say,

That one of us can put their fingers

In the other’s pocket,

Just to see.

 

Let’s imagine that we could smile at each other

Without the veil over our emotions being breached,

Escape—in spite of it all—the whips of iniquity

As they carve into our backs a map of virtue.

 

Let’s imagine

For a moment perhaps

That this thing that

Has drawn us to it

Isn’t love

 

That the love that has drawn us

To it isn’t a problem

That we never were

 

Isam:

I saw you today,

My angel,

Bright as a poem.

You’re so beautiful.

 

Fatima:

My heart went crazy at the sight of you, off in the distance.

I’m shaking.

 

I wanted to wave to you,

But I felt I was doing that without moving.

 

I can feel you under my skin. How did you do that?