My Neck Against a Wall
By Huda Alwadia
Translated by the author
Dust
devours me,
embracing my breathless lungs,
reading the glint in my ambiguous eyes.
It takes a hook,
and weaves with it the alphabet of a wrinkled city.
Who am I before this illusion?
Who am I to the homeland?
You are the lover of the streets,
the barista of love and tea,
drawing in the hunger that
gnaws at my heart with its disfigured fangs,
until I am in shreds,
my hand left severed,
hanging above the clouds,
and my neck against a wall
that separates you from me.
In war,
we don’t know boredom.
We savor the taste of ruin with a loaf of bread
and stolen music.
I am a musician
whose instruments were burned—
I rebel against myself—
and play the hum of the drone,
its clamor
piercing the white tentcloth
and Fairuz’s voice.
So, I am hung
from the city’s dangling ropes.
Its streets coil around my throat,
teaching me the universe’s illusions.
I steal a child from myself
and draw
a small, roofed house
with a colorful balloon floating above it.
Beside it stands an orange tree,
and to its left a sun,
without dust,
like the streets.
I place my drawing in a blue basket
filled with postponed death.
My city sits in Iris’s palm
scratching out every text,
every painting,
every song
befriending my black dot
and moving on.
عنقي على جدارٍ
Huda Alwadia is studying English literature at university. She is passionate about writing prose and poetry and serves as a creative writing instructor for children and youth at the Tamer Institute for Community Education.