White Limestone Is A Perfect Excuse for Pica
When I was a child,
I licked chalk walls;
they tasted
like metallic gummy bears—
strange,
and earthly familiar.
I’d look at the cracks
hidden in their orifices,
stubbornly made non-existent
by white scars,
patchworked
like the white woollen sweater
sewn by my amma
in criss-crossing patterns:
boxes,
rectangles,
squares,
the love
of eleven stillborn babies,
like fire in her belly,
dancing to the rhythm
of a black Singer machine,
in my childhood
unlocking memories:
a mixtape
of Lata–Rafi songs,
yellow threads with white,
slow orchestra
for an inexistent audience,
boutique
of her luxe pret dreams,
modelled by motionless mannequins
trying to say tongue twisters
with plastic tongues,
grey and white
in all shades,
playing with customers
who bargain
in empty shops,
with fancy ceilings
like diamonds
waiting to be dug
back into the earth,
tired
of their own glitter,
a bluey moon
hovering above
like nothing
that makes sense,
pigeonholing its skin
from fully talking
to kids with pica,
in a blur
that goes deeper
into a tunnel—
600 m long,
just like my ego,
also a lightweight matchbox:
small but a tool.
Funny how
I never realized
it’s just a tug-of-war
between memories:
white and blue, sky and oceans, people and life,
a water bottle covered in Batman and Wonder Woman stickers,
a lunchbox printed with London Bridge in a tacky font,
a stick figure drawn without its head,
cold-blooded polar bears, popsicles melting in a teacup,
LED lights,
reading Black Beauty,
and limestone
mixing with cement
for a new identity.
A dot.
Fizza Abbas is a journalist and author based in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in The Guardian, Berlin Review, ANMLY, Oxford Review of Books, diode, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Brian Fugett Memorial Prize for her chapbook, I Keep Looking at the Sky and Call It a Body (2027), and a finalist for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2021. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net 2021 and longlisted for the Propel Cambridge Poetry Prize 2026. She is the author of Bakho, Ool Jalool, and The Lament of Sunken Ships.
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