January 2024
Bio Note: I am a poet, artist and essayist. My latest poetry collection is Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023); The Taste of the Earth won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Award; Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Book Award.
Deeper Than Tattoo
What is most deep is the skin —Paul Valery Japanese Kintsukuroi fills cracks with gold or silver, its filigree tells the true story, the way scars map our skin and heart. Shouldn’t we unravel the plot behind each hurt, unearth however few gilded threads remain? Take that line on my right knee, scenes unfold: back in grad school, about to turn in an essay, unable to get up, crutches, hot baths, seventeen unplanned stitches, my aged mother up and down the stairs, ice packs instantly melting. Decades later, when I count the glistening marks laddered on my skin, I can still see her entering the room holding a wooden tray with chicken soup and toasted pita triangles spread with labneh cheese.
Originally published in Peacock Journal
Telling her Story to Stray Dogs
She lay countless nights, her moans muffled by a pillow. She could see his face that Summer morning, feel his voice bite into her flesh, a surgeon's scalpel, excising. She recalled waking from a deep sleep, opening her door to the early, unannounced messenger, his words, burning like dry ice. She stood motionless as he turned away, climbing hurriedly into his Honda. She felt a lightness, a readiness to levitate. Looking down, she saw herself in shattered glass, concealing the Venetian red-tiled corridor like snowflakes. Folded in two, she gathered some fragments, then for hours swept floors and corners filled with impalpable dust. She was surprised to hear her heartbeat. "It must have been my soul," she thought, "disintegrating into feathers of glass all over the house. It’s flown everywhere, for everyone to see, for everyone to blow away, broken debris coming out of nowhere." Weeks after, amianthus-like particles still shone on the sofas, the afghans, the lace curtains, the oak rocker, the crease of a silk pillow, the fold of a diphenbachia leaf. Many months later, sun rays would light insidiously a dark corner, reveal a faceted web of slivered dust, a glimmer on the edge of a window, within the braided arm of a wicker chair. The last one to bed, she'd lie, eyes open. Eating less each day, she became paler, watched her mother stab the eye of round with a kitchen knife, saw how she pressed garlic cloves deep into openings and brought edges together to mend the surface. At the dinner table no one would know the sealed roast had been pierced in so many places. Now her wound had healed. In the long waking hours, she'd hear the doorbell ring, see his words gather, needles welding into a silver scimitar. She could replay its swift movement in slow motion, fragment it all night- long, fingers running over her side, redesigning the leaf's imprint.
©2024 Hedy Habra
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL