Ready, Set, Love! by Hajer Requiq

"Mama says loving cannot do me good, that my heart looks like a shooting-range"

Ready, Set, Love!

by Hajer Requiq

Mama says my love is too thick,
and thick love clogs up a man’s heart.
She says men prefer lukewarm love,
room-temperature women
with 25° C hearts.
She says love tastes best chambré.
She says I should be careful with love,
that women have a tendency of playing
Russian roulette with their hearts,
that men have a way of creating murder-scenes
with blank cartridge and empty barrels.
Mama says I have the kind of body
that sheds dead skin and splinters,
the kind of hands
that burn sandalwood and napalm,
the kind of mouth
that bites into boundaries.
Mama says loving cannot do me good,
that my heart looks like a shooting-range,
men like loaded pistols,
that I am splattered with the carcasses
of all I once loved.
 
Mama says I love the wrong way,
that I kiss with my heart first,
with my lips second.
She says I shouldn’t allow myself
to kiss the edge of a mirror
inside a man’s mouth.
Mama is scared for me.
She says I talk to men the wrong way,
that love is my native language,
Arabic my second.
Mama says my body speaks love so fluently
men will want to hear its different accents.
She says men are good at pulling death penalties
out of their jeans,
producing leashes from between their teeth.
She reminds me my tongue is not a honeycomb,
my chest not a sugarcane field,
my feelings not raw dough.
Mama says men will not always know the difference
between me and a buffet-reception,
that they will drop by uninvited,
that they will ask for free sampling.
 
Mama knows about us,
knows how I lived inside your heart on credit,
housed your body on rent,
like neither of us could afford the price-tag
attached to love.
Mama knows I loved you
like there was nothing more poetic
than collateral damage,
like there was not enough wreckage
in the world already.
Mama knows how our hearts chafed together
like the boughs of a tree that ached for fire.
Mama knows I’ve got used to kissing stingers,
sharing my bed with artillery.
Mama knows loving you was an act of hospitality
towards everything I would eventually die of.
 
I remember it hurt,
the first time my heartbeat synchronized with gunshot,
the first time I shaved glass shards from my skin,
the first time you showed me
how to recycle my severed parts into poetry,
the first time I realized my poems were matchsticks
and I am addicted to the smell of burning.
Or, put more accurately:
This is how long it takes from heartbreak
to feel safe in a silo —
All I know is bearing a heart like mine
can only be an act of faith.
 
I remember mama telling me:
“Azizati,[1] I know you are angry
and ready to break things,
but please, do not be one of them.”

¹Translates from Arabic to “my dear.”

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