Crying at your parroted voice,
the recorded betrayal;
laughing at the hypocrisies.
Swallowing a pill instead of their slop,
vomiting blood into the toilet-bowl.
Every evening, interrogations,
every morning, yard-drills, blindfolded.

Love chipping its way out through the wall,
dying under the blinking cameras.
Sleeping on the cold floor,
a mess of blood, nightmares, and groans,
weeping under a single dirty blanket.

Your memories are compacted in me.
I am the burning striplight, cursing this night.
Like a hopeless shadow, strung from my feet,
I run to find I’m forever behind myself.
The last kiss was my lips’ silent seal.

I scratch your name with my nail.
It’s the code to every locked door,
like a droplet in the wet wind
that joins the winding river.

Wrap your arms around me
with the world between us.
I am tired. You are tired. The world is emptied.

It’s pointless to think of freedom
when, outside, our own prison awaits us.
The days that are numbered
speak to us of worse days.
We’ll grow green in the cracks of cement and darkness,
even if this is the last winter.

Except for those perfect eyes,
everything in this world is worthless.
It was I who never truly existed;
it was happiness that never truly existed;
and love is
only a scratch
on a cell wall.

You held me tight
in a house with no exits, no doors, no windows;
you held my charred body
pulled it from the ashes.
I was frozen with fear, doubt, and exile;
you circled me like a fire in winter.
Your arms supported me like walls.
You held my body
like a newborn, newly orphaned.
You held me
like a lonely shore holds the sea;
like a quiet alley contains the stray dogs;
like a long-forgotten feeling I can’t name;
like a joyful scientist who’s proved her theory;
you held me
as I was dying from the weight of farewell,
you held me, for the last time, held me
as your bittersweet smile whispered:
“No one will ever understand why we cry.”

I left your safe embrace for dangerous arms,
I went further than I believed possible.
I dug a solitary cell,
breaking into yet another prison beyond exile.

You remained,
like ruins after war,
you remained,
weary and longing;
I was the one who left.

I left
from the flames licking at the moth’s fate,
from a home that was only a name,
the journey that is the last fatal glass,
not the path’s beginning, but a slow dying.

My life is a line stretched between pain and departure,
suitcases heavy with loneliness,
fighting with empty hands,
hoping for a day that could never come.
My life is smoke drawn through a vent,
a nightmare writhing on the pillow.

Here, lost in the night until morning,
I wept myself away, drip by drip, like a candle,
like a whirlwind, madness spinning inside me.
All I wanted was a Nothing, bigger than I could hold.
No apple, no wheat, no evil, not even Eve to blame,
exile was always Adam’s fate, from eternity to eternity.
Here, I forgot what I was, piece by piece,
only your name remained, the last part of me.
I remember you held me in the storm.

You held me
like one human reaches for another,
like the last fragment of a memory,
like a torn picture of a ruined house.
I was tired, thirsty, wandering;
you held me like the only shade in the blazing noon.
You were not here, yet
from the first moment to the last,
you held me.

I held you
like clutching a pillow in turmoil,
with an unbroken stream of tears,
like a mountain before its collapse.
I embraced you
in a way only you will know.

In Norway,
it is snow that falls thick from the sky;
trees rise from the earth,
and rivers are something that flow gently
through the snow and trees.

I come from the Middle East
where missiles, riddled planes,
fallen angels, incomplete miracles,
fall from the sky.

I come from the Middle East,
where anti-personnel mines, soldiers with batons,
skyscrapers and street children,
rise from the earth.

I come from the Middle East,
where rivers wash away everything but blood;
and the rainbow child*,
that sorrowful unicorn,
is gunned down in the streets.

In Norway,
they call the Middle East ‘Midtøsten.’
In the Middle East,
they don’t call it anything;
they died before they could.