Basma El-Amir

I arrange the anxiety of the streets
and my own anxiety, in the clock of your chest
you who hid in it a bold headline
for a loaf of bread and a book of poetry,
and a story about a woman who practises my
bad habits of longing, of yearning, of madness
and sleeps among the graves to resemble me more
just like me, she makes your coffee with love
and like me she puts her sugar in your cup
and like me, too,
she drinks the bitterness alone

My companion, ever since I learned that you suffer, as I do, from the sickness of loneliness
I have been persuading my loneliness that she is a woman
a beautiful one
and I try to steady her astonishment whenever it is scaled by
a wish to live the noise of life
In your many addresses I search for her a story
that will moisten her heart
and I speak to her plainly of a distant joy,,
I travel with her in a tale towards it
and together we lose ourselves in the labyrinths of the place

Then I see you with the eyes of that man in whose chest-clock I set my anxiety
how you smoke the fires of the world
and choke on your hidden loaf, and swallow your pain
with the woman who resembles me, and drink your coffee sweet yet utterly bitter
and carve your face with a smile to tell me
that my anxiety is still safe in your chest

• ,