(AT THE DEPORTATION CENTRE)

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue 
against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about 
the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past 
the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? 
When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the 
memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the 
mouth of a shark. I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so 
long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another 
language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I tore up and ate 
my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t 
afford to forget.
 
*
 
They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The 
Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the 
city of Rome with no jacket. I hope the journey meant more than miles 
because all of my children are in the water. I thought the sea was safer 
than the land. I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running 
and running. I want to lay down, but these countries are like uncles who 
touch you when you’re young and asleep. Look at all these borders, 
foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour 
of the hot sun on my face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent 
days and nights in the stomach of the truck, I did not come out the same. 
Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.
 
*
 
I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I 
have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not 
beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my 
body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I 
watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, 
the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration 
officer, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the 
English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah 
all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a
truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and 
nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, 
or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.
 
*
 
I hear them say, go home, I hear them say, fucking immigrants, fucking 
refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is 
like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second and the next 
you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency 
waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, 
the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a 
shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I’ll see you on the other side.