Now + Turning Point

Collage by Aybik.

Now

In the garden I became a poet. It was an accident, of course.
I happened upon the trees—or should I say 
they happened upon me—and they held me 
and held me and wouldn’t let go. 

Ten years later I still can’t leave them. 
There’s a door in the bark that won’t close,
a hollow with lights that flicker but never shut off.

In my state I’ve lost the talent for suggestion, 
so I will speak plainly and hope it is enough.

I want the future to want me back. 
I want to step off the edge of becoming, to go where other people are—
To leave the world of self-mythology and become real.
From beyond the cliff dusk beckons. It’s eternal, peppery and sweet.
Fig trees yawn sleepily. Plates shift imperceptibly underground.
Other people are there, living lives I’ve never seen.
Their warmth is terrifying and undeniable. 

I’m desperate for it, like a baby for a bottle.

The mind wants to leave with it, but the body begs the mind not to—
goes so far as to offer it blood: a gift, a last resort.
In the body’s latest plot to keep me alive it sits and reads 
about Aztec rituals, digests none of it. Then, the necessity of poetry.
A phrase sticks to the tongue and then dissolves.
Eventually it retreats into a dark room, strategically sleeping the morning away,
unaware all the while of its miraculousness.  
The body has learnt its first lesson in the world of the future, the world 
of real people: Nothing means nothing. 
Everything is precious and rudimentary and now, now. 

Turning Point

In the dream I didn’t know who the women were—
If they were three different women, or if they were the same soft face
Happening three times under the water. It hurt to touch them
And to stop touching and when I realized I’d killed them
It hurt the most. Irrefutably: something was wrong.

I wished, in that moment, for the wrongness to make a mark upon my body,
And that I could point to this mark, that someone else
Could point to it and say there—
There—

And then they too could hear the tree fall—
The tree that fell a decade ago—it’s falling all the time—
Down, down, to where the dead cat lies, face-up, skin-only—
Down into the pink expanse—

And when finally I wake up to the house it is sleeping.
My mother, a poor sleeper herself, lives in the heart of it.
She looks at me and says: You are the carrier
Of an ever-present and rhymeless guilt.
And then nods to a seat at the table.
Readily I take it and pick the thread loose. ◆

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Shadya Abu-Naim is a Palestinian tutor/emerging writer living in Jordan. She has published two poems in literary journal Rust+Moth. Find her on Instagram.