Every boy I’ve ever loved had a smile that curled up inside blood. Each time he spread his hands to show me how deep his love for me was, I saw map routes to cities abandoned by him in his palm lines. Each city had a woman weeping in it. He folded his arms like a memory before I could make out who those women were.
Maa shoves a prayer down my throat saying she wishes to see me alive. I open my eyes and something sparkle inside the black of what’s left from my dream. I open my mouth and a wish leaves my tongue like a poem. I recite it again and again until my lover shuts my mouth with his.
My sister says that there’s a lady in Palastine who makes flower gardens out of Israeli gas bomb shells. And that teaches me that a ruin is not the end. It gives me hope. A hope that my ruin maybe a temple waiting to be discovered and someday someone might pray upon my doorstep and I will bloom into life.
On somedays I look out the window to see butterflies asking permission to drink honey from flowers. They flutter their wings, they land gently on their skin, they touch with at most care and then they drink the nectar like worshipping them. The very act of watching a butterfly at work is very much like a prayer. And sometimes I wish humans were also like butterflies, because then they’ll never learn to rape.
— Butterflies are better when it comes to consent
