The Poem Still in My Mouth

Everything is going as planned.

Everything is fine.

Everything except this heart leaping to the heights of fear.

Trembling before the intimation of the knife.

 

I said to my crazed heart: everything is going as planned. My turn will come and everything will be over. There’s no need for your foolish bolting. You’re overreacting.

My hands were sweating and my mouth went dry.

I am a sea, I am a desert.

 

My insides contracted, my fingers ached, and my skin crawled. I felt the rush of blood under my skin, and my heart, damn thing, flailing around in my extremities. I am a mad dancer.

A voice inside me cried: Get out of here, Fatima! Get out of here right now! I said to my heart: You’re stupid and understand nothing! You want me to miss this moment because you are scared and cowardly! I’m telling you everything is going as planned but you don’t believe it! You’re so thick! My heart said, Run, Fatima. Run before it’s too late.

I ignored my intuition and its divinations. I decided not to listen to the wailing inside me. I set the paper before me, the pen to its right. I took a breath from a far-off place and got ready to read.

I swallowed with difficulty. I was dry as a desert, drained and dehydrated. I said to myself: Everything will be fine when I put the poem in my mouth. The poem will replenish me, the poem will speak me.

Isam finished his last poem. They were clapping for him, and his mother smiled. He had done well. Nisrine came up to the podium. She was about to introduce me to the audience, to read my name in public, to announce my hour.

“A new face on the poetry scene in Kuwait . . . highly distinctive poems, transmitted through the intimacy of experience and her ability to grapple with existence . . .”

I heard the sound of Nisrine’s voice, and another sound. A sound of steps approaching. Steps I knew. I knew their weight, I heard them every day, fourteen times, coming down to the basement, and going up to the world.

My heart is sad for you, Fatima.

Said my heart.

 

I heard the scraping of the shoes on the ceramic tiles, a sound that roused all of my instincts. I was the offering who knew the glimmer of the knife in the executioner’s eyes. Everyone disappeared and the tomb was there. I was falling while the sound approached, and approached. The shadow reached inside. The face appeared from behind the door, the face/the inferno, the face/the gallows.

The face saw me and I saw it.

“The poet, Fatima Abdel-Rahim . . .”

I stood up, a string pulled taut. I was the bow and the arrow, I was the victim and the blood.

I gathered my papers. The mute whimper in my chest retreated, everything slipped from my hands, conspiring against me. The papers and the tears fell on the poems, on the ground, on my cheeks. The world disappeared into a drop of water. Everything was over.

I looked at Isam, from the twilight of water falling from my eyes. I wanted to say goodbye. Isam whispered uncertainly, Fatima, what’s wrong? I didn’t answer.

I looked at the face growing from this burning hellfire, at the valleys of scalding water in his eyes, the Zaqqum tree on his forehead. The whip and the cleaver and the iron bars and the menace in his furrowed eyebrows. I pointed at him and closed my eyes over my tears. I was a bird in the den of the beast, the sky out of wings’ reach.

The hand that came down on my face, heavy as a bomb, burst my head against the wall, threw me to the ground.

“You idiot!”

Everything shook.

The world was yanked from its lovely frame.

“You dirty . . . !”

But I hadn’t read a thing.

The poem was still in my mouth.

“You harlot!”

Isam ran. Saqr flung a chair at him, our friends jumped up, surrounded Isam. His mother threw herself on top of him. The voices came together in a single mass.

A blue light in my eyes, a red wailing in my head. I heard nothing but his voice . . . the voice of my beloved coming down from an eighth heaven. . . .

“He calls you by your name, you animal!”

My name must remain covered up. My name is a scandal.

His hand gripped my head, his hand was a pair of pliers, the pliers were dragging me . . .

To my immense confusion, gasping in pain.

“Get moving!”

But the poem was still in my mouth.

“You disgrace me, may God disgrace you!”

 

A second blow came down

From the heights of its might,

Landed on my face.

 

My poem ran from my mouth

A red thread.