Emilie’s Reviews > Songs My Enemy Taught Me > Status Update

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.