Your little girl

Your missing rib
A girl who turns the rattle of your heart on in her bed
The crackling of your joints while you make love to her
Like an old man moving slowly between the kiss and the shoes
And [she who] sleeps on her right side
So that her heart remains free if it should try and crawl toward you

And she who writes to live
Without you realizing that, every night, she slips her papers between your eyelids
And hopes she passes through your dream

Then what?
Asks a girl who washed her hair
And hid out from the mirror
So you won’t see her as she wipes the love off her body in the morning
With a blue cloth
And walks toward life with a twisted ankle
And with steps that look as they’re musical notes of yesterday

Then what?
Asks a man who dips his feet in the water
And reaches out his hand to the other bank, to probe her womb
Then what?
He strokes her wound and tells her that she came out of the bottle
And that the world and hopes are all hers
Then he fills the bucket of her tomorrow
With scratches, kisses and embossed regrets

They said: Love is a lake in the voice
In which all the words you throw seem to sink and sink
While all fishhooks fish out long breaths

This little girl of yours
Switches on a light and sees her back in the mirror
Where her backbone encloses like a cage
And she thinks of a color to paint a wide gap with
To conceal the lake underneath
After she rearranged her vertebras and colors
And tells you that she doesn’t want the world
That she wants your laughing hands and long untruth

And she writes to die
She eagers to take off her muffler on a mulberry tree
What’s the meaning of life being a distant fire burning
And of her lusting to sleep in the place of any cut branch
Of a tree that’s not lonesome

And in the glass of every day, she makes a room to poisons
And she writes to hang her theriaca on the tail of your larynx
And follows you like the remorse of yours you buried
And loves you like a little, mysterious room
Containing a bed with two bodies imprinted on it
And she doesn’t forget to re-hatch the outline of your shadow
on the bedsheets every day
And to carve a thin line with her finger
A thin line which is your missing rib
She names it “me”
And returns to it

Marwa Melhem