In Arabic

In her room in my house, a teenage girl speaks a language

I don’t understand, a language she makes into gravel

to fling at her father, across a thousand miles.

 

Like a mood ring set on a stove, she changes

when she hears her father’s voice--the atmosphere

around her body turns dark purple, spiked

 

with yellow-green knives. He tells her to cover

her neck and head. When she argues,

it sounds as if she were being strangled,

 

scraping the bottom of a river whose current

presses her under. In Amman, women stream

the streets, heads scarved. A river can take a girl

 

and pin her to a rock, like an uncle pushing

a child against a wall, his hand bigger than the whole

of her sex. Some Arab women paint their hands

 

with intricate, hennaed patterns, like the swirls

this girl now doodles on the back of her fist

in blue pen, a design with four quadrants, a symmetry

 

with such confidence it must have arisen

from beneath her skin. She has her compass,

her knives. She will survive.

 

from Body Painting