New Poems by Mahvash Mossaed

July 14, 2018

Museum

My kitchen is a museum.

The paint box is in the microwave

deciding on if it wants to be a master piece or just a piece of burnt eggplant.

Next, I will be permanently moving into the refrigerator,

where all my lovers are just frozen memories

and are stored in the ice box.

I sit myself at the kitchen table

with an empty plate in front of me and a knife,

cutting my passed years in small square pieces.

I write down the name of my first love on a piece of lettuce with white sugar.

It does not look at all the way I imagine it to be.

Now my smile is stretched to the moon and back.

The sun is a frozen shape in a dark shade of blue.

My eyes are two sail boats lost in the river I have cried,

yet there is no wind and there is no shore in sight.

No, it is not at all the way I imagined it to end.

I am no longer here.

That is the true definition of “the end.”

—–

The Way You Write

I so much like the way you write.

I like the way you jump into the middle of your sentence, unexpected and unannounced, not elegantly dressed – barefoot, with your hair uncombed, your shirt unbuttoned.

I often wait for the night to fall to be all alone,

so in silence your words could read me aloud,

so that your words could float in and out of me

and play me like a violin in the dark,

so that your words could pierce me and swallow me,

so that I could inhale them, and they could exhale me.

Can one die of not being loved? I ask.

Can one be shattered, falling off the height of love,

and keep his broken heart in a cast for life?

You write and write and write
just to kill your enemy. You have hated
your enemy for so long that you have already become it.You kill your enemy so that you become a complete sentence ending with a full-stop.

I like so much the way you write!

—–

Sigh

I invite you to my mirror

Even though I know everyone wants to find only themselves in every mirror they pass by.

I shield your illusions just so that you do not feel guilty for your wrongs.

I bring out our old ladder and climb up to reach and catch the most faraway star.

I invite you to come to my balcony of jasmine and light.

I bend down from up there to watch the miniature cars and miniature lives go by.

My tears fall… oh, how my life has been just a long sigh!

—–

Planet of the End

Can you hear me while I am reading aloud my book of tears?

Can you watch me when I am walking on wet clouds?

Next summer we will be planting mint and parsley

in a snow garden forsaken in a nameless planet.

There are many doors wide open to this one patch of the sky,

But still to avoid any blood stains, blue is the color I paint the rivers running towards the clouds.

We step on our computers on purpose while they are spreading their frozen cubical news,

the news which is prisoned in a velvet box.

You can wind it up so that the dancing ballerinas pop up.

There is a forest of voices deposing against our silence.

I hang the wilted wet moon on a branch of the screaming cactus

in the darkness of our backyard at night to dry.

Someone will soon call me by my secret name,

someone who can read the invisible words written in the irises of my eyes.

My karma and my destiny finally meet and will be walking away holding hands.

My birth and my death will become one

while I am in process of becoming everything.

Entering through one of these many doors wide open to a small patch of this yellow cloudless sky.

Tags: Mahvash, Mahvash Mossaed, poems, Poetry

Posted in Mahvash Mossaed, Poetry |

A Woman Defined