Status Updates From Songs My Enemy Taught Me

hmmmmm heb vragen

today you are unbroken/walking backward into a room/ and retuming his kisses/unopened/you are folding his fist like origami butterflies/and setting each fist free through a first floor window, today/you are walking into the punch/ and swallowing it whole,/you are/gestating it for /nine long years/ until it is born into your / palms / and you are unbroken / unflinching / unmarked // teaching your hands / how to fly.

What colours do civil unrest come in; / can it be snipped to fit better across the hip, how can war extenuate / the silhouette?

something beautiful. Something fare. Wondering who they will marry; / whether / their wives will have faces, whether they will give birth to bombs / too.

Men are made of fuck and silver / she said / and kisses / are wounds not yet healed.

mother / the song was inside us. forgive us. we walked in symphony, a man learns with his hands. forgive us our youth. we sons wore women like
uniforms. forgive us. we sold our sisters on the long walk to the fields. forgive us. masculinity is madness.

how Orwell freed Man while his wife prepared oysters in another part / of the house / stage left;

how Shakespeare tamed your tongue and made of it a tourniquet to / stop the words bleeding;

The Taliban have forbidden love / Every lover is an enemy, every bed war [from a collection of landays which are short-form Afghan poetry from 7 refugee women she met in London 2017]

I put it to you that you are lying / (in wait / quiet as truth/ dumb as daylight/ exiled from our skin)
- from ‘crown court’

tick box tattoos: / you have never seen a woman drowning in wild seas of council flat
carpets, / or felt your stomach become a mouth that eats you.

here is a saucepan // stir yourself into it
/ here is the punch surgically removed from the knuckle

I was going to be someone, he said, but forgot who that was, walked / straight past him on my way into her; / in the morning / sheets were stained the shape of nothing much, long car rides, grey roads / that/ become conveyor belts that feed into the factory, the family factory, that /
turns as one to eat him.

free speech / is expensive round these parts // it is better to leave it there where you found it, Miss, on the mantelpiece, in the pretty cage, pecking at the bones of truth.

you will give birth many times in a life that is 5 dogs long. you will have many children. / all of the children will be you.

We are incubated in the club light; is it true that lightbulbs attract the dark? we are born onto a stuttering dancefloor, on which I first told you my name,

and so I took my face to a field, to a nothing, a nowhere, where the seeds of women are sown, and there / I set it free.

I understand why the cow gives its blood willingly, what it wants to leave. The cow is afraid of its own body.

behind black coffins laden with absence / we cannot leave it folded in anthems at the end of the bed;

some say in the tears of mothers, some say in her own, / some do not speak at all. / But we the women know / this is her black hole, that will eat/ her whole
[on FGM in West Africa, 2017]

we've been married since I first came/ she cooks for me/ you know/ makes good the bed/ all of that/ I like to think I taught her to be human/ that I gave her language/ and fire/ and schools/ a little bit of extra cash for the side days.

those who remain those who eat alone those who sleep alone those who dream alone those who look to the east those who blink to the west

mouthing through smeared air at one another / unsure of who is the animal.