This Talk of Poems

Amal El-Mohtar

I will tell you this thing,
as I do
(this is the game we play together:
one retracts the half-revealed,
one coaxes out what’s left concealed). This, then,
is what I will say to you,
stumbling over your eyes’ architecture,
a clumsy grasping after words—
I called your eyes cathedrals, was sincere,
and blush to remember how you laughed—
this, then, is what I will say—

no, I can’t. Not yet! Not now,
not when the secret curls and stammers
while you clamour insistence, disbelief—not now,
but later, perhaps, when you don’t expect
a sudden surge of metaphor,
a tidal rush, a rising line of foam and salt
to soak shock into your ankles.

We’re not there yet. Not yet at the place
where I can tell you how I think
of days when you’ll tell some other girl
about this girl who read you poems
thinking you enjoyed them, thinking
you listened to anything more than the sound of her voice,
the funny lilting of her foreign vowels
and her foreign cadence,
mixing syllables and emphases
while longing for yours.

“She even wrote me a poem,” you’ll say,
to this other girl, cool and secure
in her place at the end of your history,
“and it was a bit shit, but what do I know
about poetry.”

I won’t tell you this, won’t read you this,
because how could it ever be the time
to tell you I write in self-defence,
to tell you that to write to you
is to think of you hurting me—
to imagine you hurting me
if you haven’t yet—

and to remember that when I said
those poems I wrote for other people
those poems I didn’t write for you
are full of thorns, are healing stings,
are scabbing over wounds—
you said,
you don’t care about me enough
to write a poem—
but meant
you don’t care about me enough
to let me hurt you.

You’ll say this isn’t fair. How could you know
that a poem is a grudge
clutched tight against the liver, bile-steeped,
nursed to savage potency? How could you know
that a poem is catharsis,
is septic in conception, a boil
lanced in execution?

You never listened, after all,
to anything but the sound of my voice.

So I’ll cut you this slack. Here is a poem.
It isn’t pretty, it isn’t built
of honey and spice, isn’t sweet
or savoury, isn’t anything
like what a poem is thought to be.
I won’t call you Green Man, Diamond Jack,
Knight of Coins or Pentacles,
won’t speak of stretching out on graves,
or how the tracery of your irises
might have taught architects to dream
of stained glass.

I certainly won’t tell you I love you.

And maybe once you’ve read it,
to yourself, in quiet,
in your own mind’s voice,
you’ll think twice before asking me
to write you another.

Amal El-Mohtar is the Nebula-nominated author of The Honey Month, a collection of spontaneous short stories and poems written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey. She is a two-time winner of the Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem, and edits Goblin Fruit, an online quarterly dedicated to fantastical poetry. Her work has appeared in multiple venues online and in print, including Apex, Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, and Glitter & Mayhem, a speculative nightclub anthology. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, and on Twitter as tithenai.

She calls “This Talk of Poems” a “cautionary tale about what happens when someone who doesn’t read poetry complains to their poet-lover about the fact that she has not written them any poems.”

If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read, please consider pitching in to keep us going. Your donation goes toward future content.

 
 

Return to Table of Contents