The News Arrives Dressed in Blood and Bridesong.
Art by Max Kleinen on Unsplash.
The News Arrives Dressed in Blood and Bridesong.
The news came in hips first— wide, bruised, the way a mother breaks
before her child can finish a scream. It came with the scent of pinky wounds,
blood bright as gossip in a girl’s ear, already feasting on the whites of your eyes.
You watched it crawl down the screen like a dying prayer.
It spoke the language your people once wore gently on their lips—
now it splits there, twitches, folds itself into the clean suit of a white fear.
The first headline fell like a cracked tooth: your sister’s body, bullet blooming inside her
chest— a dark flower seeking asylum. It found her before you could name it.
She froze, hands mid-prayer, eyes thundered wide like mascara struck by God.
Death rouged her cheeks— made her a bride for the quiet genocides,
where the veil is smoke and the altar is ash.
Some truths blister harder than fire suckling a nipple. Still, I swear,
death has a kind of beauty in how it leaves the body mid-breath—
how it teaches the ribs to open like a cage welcoming silence.
God watched. But he did not speak. Only place his hands behind your ears,
as if to whisper: more bodies will rot before the earth says enough.
The sun had already baked sorrow into the rim of the sky.
The sand grew wet with grief, dragging your name behind it like a broken heirloom.
Titalin walked here once— barefoot girl, bones memorized by the soil, walls
remembering her breath longer than her family could.
Behind you, girls gather like dusk. And you fear— feminism took a bite
of the kola nut in genocide’s house, and now waits— not to speak, but to kill again
before marriage is offered. So you write. You bury their bodies inside
the belly of a poem. Every stanza becomes a casket. Every line—
a river that forgets what color blood was before it dried. Even the sky can’t guess the
imagery anymore. You remember: what kills a woman is not always loud.
Sometimes, it’s tender. Sometimes, it holds her hand first. Sometimes, it looks like a
man reading the news out loud.
Until the white dress burns on the body of a girl who only ever wanted to dance.
Art by Ալեք Հայրապետյան on Unsplash.
Why Must We Numb Our Breath on the Gap Tooth of Genocide.
Sometimes I want to offer my Salah in a city where breath is not an alarm—
where bullets do not memorize bodies,
where the call to prayer doesn’t echo inside the mouth of a grave.
The fervor is never sweet enough to finish. I taste it.
Just before the last Allahu Akbar, the bullet arrives like punctuation,
and ends the surah before breath.
The edge of every prayer wants to be kissed
by something soft— a grandmother’s palm, a fig leaf,
the hush of a child who has only ever seen sky
through barbed wire. My Imam faces Qibla, and we fall into Sujud,
but our foreheads kiss not ground, only the mouth of wrath.
Some of us never rise again. A mother’s blood blooms on her daughter’s mouth—
a gloss, a verse, a warning. She prays. She begs God to give the genocide
an exit wound. But wrath does not leave. It multiplies.
And so we whisper into the corners of night, hoping Laylat al-Qadr
will arrive like a cure, hoping the angels will recognize this ache
and unfasten the ropes around our throats.
Chaos takes its shoes off at our doors. Hemorrhage becomes a moon phase.
I hear voices folding themselves into leaflets,
words shot from printing presses faster than from guns.
But I’m not here for pamphlets— I’m here for the girl,
her back bent like a comma on her mother’s spine,
watching genocide like it’s a bedtime story told too loud.
Her stepmother narrates with trembling Taqwa:
She saw something falling from Eden, thought it was a star.
It was a body. The distance between her and God
is the pause between screams. What you choose to call that pause.
is the language of the living. But she already knows. She already knows.
mid-la ilaha illa Allah.
Art by Maria Kovalets on Unsplash.
Dust Songs On Blood Parchment.
I asked God not to thread light through every darkened eye.
Let night remain unanswered. Let no moon wane its mercy
on the heart of a boy who reeks of burnt silk and genocide.
The night— forbidden, slick with brown algae—I curled on my grandmother’s lap.
Fear was a small animal between my palms, panting, wild, until the sand hissed,
Rewind yourself. This is not the first war you’ve worn. Her body was already
cascading— a slow collapse between breast and breath.
Fear had made a nest there. She held beauty the way a wound holds salt:
delicate, terrible, fluent in everything the world was too clean to utter aloud.
Even blood knew when to retreat. The nakedness of life tore our mothers into
scripture— their bodies offered as ash to the doctrine of dirt. And I swear,
I feared the hand of every man who could name death and still chew it like bread.
Forgive me. I only know how to pray in the language of my grandmother’s hair—
white, soft as angel static, each strand humming what we lost.
Genocide boiled the body long before it touched the gene.
We were born from it— souls sewn in helix and cobra, nostrils flaring with funk,
singing heaven’s skin into peelings like prayers not meant for angels.
This is the art of the soil— wrath glistening back into flesh.
The moon, learning to fire a gun, leans against a broken stalk of sun.
We carved our names into our own ribs and ran— but the clouds split open and
Auroras fell like God’s drunken regrets. We drowned in that beauty.
Genocide, with romance wetting his lips, kissed the bruise on our breastbone and
said, Dance. Or die. And so we danced— fluent, wild, hips cracked like firewood.
He asked for a night to strip the truth naked from us. But I swear— we remembered.
We climbed to the peak and screamed Not again.
Pity followed like smoke. It begged us to return. And we did— not as bodies, but dust.
Holy dust, still smoldering with all we refused to forget.
Holy dust still smoldering with all we refused to forget.
Art by Jon Bagnato on Unsplash.
Buffering
There was too much god in the bandwidth.
You wore mascara like scripture, black and trembling on your lashes—
a prayer smudged across the face of a mirror that never learned your name.
Failure came in shades of red: lipstick on your teeth, a psalm you couldn’t sing.
You reached for heaven with trembling thumbs, typed forgive me into search bars
already broken. Your palms held nothing but passwords and sweat.
You whispered the first time? The rope answered. Not with death,
just the idea of leaving somewhere no one would notice you’d gone.
Your sins stalled, buffering. Spinning circles in the silence, a wheel of regret
you couldn’t close. And your dreams? Spit-stitched into the margins of god’s private
diary— he reads them drunk, tongue sliding over your fears like thunder learning your
accent. You tried to pray. But the app crashed. Faith was down for maintenance.
Your data plan expired somewhere between hallelujah and help me.
Your voice coiled into chrome, disappeared into a girl wearing cobwebs and god’s last
voicemail. You tried again.
Uploaded guilt to the cloud: SHAME_v3_finalFINAL.pdf. Clicked send.
The server laughed. Forgiveness bounced back: error 404 – insufficient grace.
No bush burned. No sky split. Only exile— mascara bleeding down your cheeks like
melted icons, knees leaking wifi, legs twisted into ladders no one climbed.
Hell arrived like a pop-up: we missed you, angel. You didn’t answer.
You prayed until your bones cracked, until your thighs became altars, until your spine
hummed with static. Still, no reply. Only silence, and the echo of your sin
wearing your face, wearing your name, wearing a crown of fire.
& the echo of your sin wearing your face like a crown of fire.
Art by Massimo Virgilio on Unsplash.
My Mother Taught Me How to Bleed Beautiful.
My mother said— when the bullet arrives, wear your chest like a flag.
Tell him: I am a soldier with a bounty for a face, eyes like butterfly wings molting mid-
flight— fragile miracles born in a war-womb. She said—
anything crafted in beauty was never meant to be kissed by cactus thorns
or baptized in the bitter mouth of carcadé. But even sugar burns when left
too long in a grieving tongue. I swear— when chaos comes, it comes barefoot,
knocking its bloodied knuckles on the ballroom of your ribs.
You’ll think it’s a lover— the way it wears feathers and murmurs your name
into the wallpaper of ruined things. When the elegy wants to enter,
your heart narrows into a house of locked doors.
The day won’t knock. It will blaze through your windows and whisper:
this body, this grief, will not survive past the skin of an onion.
But bullets— they are men who take off their shoes and place them softly on your
throat. To wear them is to die politely. To die is to cup your breath like holy water
in a revolution of silence where even jokes are assassinated,
and the moon shows us its stone face and says nothing.
Some days, the sky refuses to look away.
The sand sharpens its tongue and licks blood from the petals of a dying man.
Some days, even the stars turn their backs and hum dirges in blue.
My mother once said a cobalt night stood beside her like a priest,
and she wondered if Father’s body was already a smoke. I swear—
grief is an ocean that forgets your name. It swallows you without asking.
And what is rage if not love that lost its map and fell in love with fire?
I saw a man— his head wrapped in Nasko cloth, kneeling under a hemorrhaging sky,
begging the heavens to lower the temperature of a burning city.
Before I could speak, the clouds burst open and bled forgotten names in red vowels.
Forgive me. Nobody ascends to heaven without learning to rot first.
Maybe heaven is just sporadic rain on the skin of Harmattan—
blood in the nostrils, iron in the breath, and the silence after God closes His mouth.
