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.

Contusions
by Shadi Eskandani
Poetry
View Shadi Eskandani’s author profile.

TopArt by Gilbert Li and Lauren Wickware
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