SAFIA ELHILLO скачать в хорошем качестве

SAFIA ELHILLO

Safia Elhillo reads her poem ‘Orpheus’ Recorded at Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2022 ORPHEUS Mold blooms on the yogurt, furring the edge in ancient colors. My body is something I have worn for other people. Even five years ago I would not recognize myself today, married, gallon bags of animal bone and corncobs in the freezer to boil for stock. I am far away from the cities of my girlhood, cool concrete of their stairwells. The new therapist wants a list of compliments I’d give myself on behalf of those who love me, and all I can come up with is resourceful. For a time I believed myself in love with Orpheus, which only meant I loved what I could make if I were free from what happened to my body. That man who would never touch me, kept distant and without danger by the barriers of fiction. When I believed the work would save me. I have no real use now for those Greek myths, their dead girls, women raped by men and animals. Today the door is locked. Today nobody is outside. Muscle cramping mid-lap in the dark blue water. Now I embroider flowers in dim colors in my new country of flowers, clumsy stitches through the stencil of an orchid, remembering my younger mouth pressed to a flute, unable to release the breath. I’d liked that he was a musician, fingers long as spring onions. As a child I ruined my sweaters, the sleeves tugged down to cover my hand before touching any doorknob or handling coins. Teenaged, loitering, urgently lonely. The cotton t-shirts curling at their sliced hems. Now I am thick-fingered and practical as my mother and her mother, smell of bleach against ceramic. Gone is L’s humid little apartment, violent stain on the bathroom tile, a bottle of crimson nailpolish shattered long ago and leaving streaks like blood. Her dirty living room where I slept for nights on end, though my own apartment was nearby, cleaner— I can’t imagine them, the poems that softened the hearts of gods, the poems that changed anything. That first cigarette I accepted, metal of the fire escape against my bare legs, where she allowed me to tell the entire story without using the real words. The night cooling and gathered close. The way nothing ever feels truly clean in summer. And all I know about Eurydice is that she died. My every other fact about her is about him. © 2017, Safia Elhillo From: The January Children Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Discover more poets and poems at poetryinternational.com @ Poetry International