when liberation comes
“the old world is dying,
& the new world struggles to be born:
now is the time of monsters”
— Antonio Gramsci
it will creep through the back door / slam the front one shut / it will feel gaseous / and putrid / thick with what nows / and what ofs / when liberation comes / the rivers will remember their names / the soldiers will feed themselves on the soil caked into their boots / women will flock to their balconies / polluting the air with cries of joygrief / teenagers will kiss under bridges / some will write furiously, bleeding / and some will sit on the street / all of us will cross borders / sing old love songs / burn something to baptise a new earth / the whole world will become a memorial / the whole world already is
your body is my [google] maps
after & with lines from Nizar Qabbani
at night I cyberspace my way thru memory
searching all the journeys we took to one another
TEXT: I miss yr nighttime قصيدة [1] to
the beauty mark on my collarbone
my jugular thick & knotted; nile-like.
you bite into me wa I flood
TEXT: I abdicate from history & inhabit the tale of
antar wa abla wa qays wa layla. for you,
I tell a story of love untethered to soil.
TEXT: LIBERATE ME! (from yr silence)
TEXT: code me into yr archive as a CHANGED BORDER:
sinai of memory a reclamation. a spectered victory.
I am a haunted lip on the precipice of violence.
TEXT: I am the oldest capital of grief.
TEXT: DIGITISE ME! (I would live in yr software,
glitching quietly)
TEXT: wear me between dimensions, 7bb
I will sigh my scent through yr screen
yr fingers trace my topography so well
TEXT: (
)
un-delivered.
THE ADDRESS YOU ARE TRYING TO REACH
CANNOT BE FOUND.
[1] Meaning: ode; ancestral dedication to tribe or lost love.
Aida Bardissi is a doctoral student at NYU, where she researches
Egyptian film of the mid-twentieth century and its concerted national project(s), specialising in race, indigeneity, and the faultlines of belonging. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Mizna, Palette Poetry, Apogee Journal, and No, Dear Magazine. She calls on you to devote yourself to the daily practice of liberation.
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