I have forgotten a lot of my past life:
my birth is in fact not a matter of here or there,
regardless it is about the abandoned districts where the railroads don’t go,
in deep dark nights of the wolves, the yellowed lace of the wedding gown,
the love letters signed with the blood of the heart
there are those for years, diaries with words without meaning,
the dust settled on the wine glasses, the folded linen
as prude as the inkblot test: all empty,
nameless absence, the memories of butterflies in cocoons,
swans and deers in the fields, in that picture a perfect history:
herstory, her history, my name, that is my name:
the overlapping paths in the woods, the intertwining rainbows,
the constellations dropping on the path touching the eternity even in you.
I am at least a thousand years old, old like the galaxy,
as painfully boring, boring like an illness, the blood sugar,
milk and cigarettes, “I like milk and cigarettes”: the leather driving gloves,
the dried up roses on a dresser, the pink roses hanging upside down
that I always return to. This is the moment when I am infinite like the black of ink and paper white,
the letter between the meaning and the breath, my depted existence, unforeseen,
sentence, this sentence is my existence: this is my place, the sleeping book in the alphabetical
order of a library shelf with a memoir inside:
a name that I always have written wrong, breathing what doesn’t belong in it:
my name. It is written in the constellation that leaks down the purple sky
and is close to glamor, it is cotton clouds on the sky and the same photograph
that you always see, that is printed in multiple copies and developed to be destroyed.
The capital’s parties on the sea shores, the literary house parties and the disco balls of nightclubs,
the international airports, all glamorous, luxury, the previously not seen, fancy
and highly appreciated, the intellectuals and the socialite, the heels on the backstage
the skirt, the skirt hem, the hem’s lines, the stockings, the pearls that roll in the sea towards your bare hands,
even if you can’t touch them,
the half moon in the shoe, the black cab to the border,
that all I have forgotten: now I confess all my history, herstory, my name.
My hands are empty and my heart is open: I listen
my heart is open and my lungs are filled with northern air,
I don’t know it yet, it pounds in my heart, is a stranger,
but I have not forgotten where I come from, I have not forgotten,
how the wind throws the forest on the power lines or swings the crop on the field,
the long dark road under the sky for as long as you can see, for as long as you can walk,
there’s a road forgotten.
I am not a city girl with eyes filled with neon lights
silently humming to the dawn and a hair that stays up till last orders,
rather I come from bluish forests, the unkempt winter roads, and the moonlight, there
I come from, somewhere where even the street only has a permission to glimmer
in the holy Sunday light, in the time and space to think.
That I wrap around my finger, let down from my lap like an unknown child,
unknown like the literature is written yesterday, the ink-stained letter by letter
like a criminal, guilty for having said something, the newspaper’s archive,
the dusty bookshelf. I have written in a serious library room, in the sound of the clock, at the desk about ochre,
and earth,
with my only joy to walk amongst the tombstones of the graveyard to the deep lake:
to see the eternity end and become real again, in this romantic argument:
I only become real in this moment, my body turns from paper to flesh,
the blood and bone reply to ink rewriting me by tattoos, to become human.
In this moment I live, reading the memory that I exercise
and offer a lunch in this restaurant where people pass you by and forget easily who you are,
where you come from and where you go from here – full of the pride of the northern winds,
some full of distant languages, and somebody seeing like me:
through the weather forecast, the economy, and politics, the great names in the culture section,
the shadows thrown on the faces to aspire to be and make yourself immortal:
in that moment the forgetting starts from the retinas of the eyes, in the memory of the image,
from the moment of realizing this is the place to be, know who you are:
me? I am only the decades I have written,
the glow of the cigarette, and the ashes,
and the freedom of smoke and freedom of speech, maybe something of this
nevertheless, will live on like the flowers in the rotten ground’s lone song,
democracy, in the molded cement of the house,
still whilst I am naming myself, giving
myself this name, tell all the images and the absence,
till I conquer it
By Eeva Maria Al-Khazaali

Lit Heel