Shadi Eskandani

Contusions

i.
Spine twists into pomegranate streets
no words for deformed faces, desecrated
bodies not yet covered in white.
Hope drips from tips of fingers moulding home
in the glitter of rooftop cries to god
in a dua blown into jasmine wind
in a bullet blasting inside a woman’s chest.
Hope drips in battered limbs between
batons, broken bones across
broken earth. Home.

ii.
On a stoop in Regent Park she looks
across the street in a trance, trauma
sliding down honey skin. Stories
from back home cover like a black cloak,
decades colourless. No shimmer in this exile.
She remembers when bombs danced the sky
how her almond hands smoothed her child’s hair
how she shamed the sirens with song, sheltered her body
in a cloud of cigarette, inhaling her own absence
as she stares at nothing. Everything.

iii.
Listen: A midnight poem from a rooftop. Over
cries of Allah-o Akbar the night before,
tainted pavement. Their cameras and words told
the world to witness.