SAFIA ELHILLO

Safia Elhillo reads her poem ‘Orpheus’
Recorded at Poetry International Festival Rotterdam 2022
ORPHEUS
Mold blooms on the yogurt, furring the edge
in ancient colors. My body is something I have worn
for other people. Even five years ago
I would not recognize myself today, married, gallon bags
of animal bone and corncobs in the freezer to boil for stock.
I am far away from the cities of my girlhood, cool concrete
of their stairwells. The new therapist wants a list of compliments
I’d give myself on behalf of those who love me, and all I can come up with
is resourceful. For a time I believed myself in love with Orpheus,
which only meant I loved what I could make if I were free
from what happened to my body. That man who would never
touch me, kept distant and without danger by the barriers of fiction.
When I believed the work would save me. I have no real use now
for those Greek myths, their dead girls, women raped by men
and animals. Today the door is locked. Today nobody is outside.
Muscle cramping mid-lap in the dark blue water. Now I embroider
flowers in dim colors in my new country of flowers, clumsy stitches
through the stencil of an orchid, remembering my younger mouth
pressed to a flute, unable to release the breath. I’d liked that he was a musician,
fingers long as spring onions. As a child I ruined my sweaters,
the sleeves tugged down to cover my hand before touching
any doorknob or handling coins. Teenaged, loitering, urgently lonely.
The cotton t-shirts curling at their sliced hems. Now I am thick-fingered
and practical as my mother and her mother, smell of bleach against ceramic.
Gone is L’s humid little apartment, violent stain on the bathroom tile, a bottle of
crimson nailpolish shattered long ago and leaving streaks like blood.
Her dirty living room where I slept for nights on end, though my own apartment
was nearby, cleaner-
I can’t imagine them, the poems that softened the hearts of gods,
the poems that changed anything.
That first cigarette I accepted, metal of the fire escape against my bare legs,
where she allowed me to tell the entire story
without using the real words. The night cooling and gathered close.
The way nothing ever feels truly clean
in summer. And all I know about Eurydice
is that she died. My every other fact about her is about him.
© 2017, Safia Elhillo
From: The January Children
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
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