Mama says my love is too thick,

and thick love clogs up a man’s heart.

She says men prefer lukewarm love,

room-temperature women

with 25° C hearts.

She says love tastes best chambré.

She says I should be careful with love,

that women have a tendency of playing

Russian roulette with their hearts,

that men have a way of creating murder-scenes

with blank cartridge and empty barrels.

Mama says I have the kind of body

that sheds dead skin and splinters,

the kind of hands

that burn sandalwood and napalm,

the kind of mouth

that bites into boundaries.

Mama says loving cannot do me good,

that my heart looks like a shooting-range,

men like loaded pistols,

that I am splattered with the carcasses

of all I once loved.

Mama says I love the wrong way,

that I kiss with my heart first,

with my lips second.

She says I shouldn’t allow myself

to kiss the edge of a mirror

inside a man’s mouth.

Mama is scared for me.

She says I talk to men the wrong way,

that love is my native language,

Arabic my second.

Mama says my body speaks love so fluently

men will want to hear its different accents.

She says men are good at pulling death penalties

out of their jeans,

producing leashes from between their teeth.

She reminds me my tongue is not a honeycomb,

my chest not a sugarcane field,

my feelings not raw dough.

Mama says men will not always know the difference

between me and a buffet-reception,

that they will drop by uninvited,

that they will ask for free sampling.

Mama knows about us,

knows how I lived inside your heart on credit,

housed your body on rent,

like neither of us could afford the price-tag

attached to love.

Mama knows I loved you

like there was nothing more poetic

than collateral damage,

like there was not enough wreckage

in the world already.

Mama knows how our hearts chafed together

like the boughs of a tree that ached for fire.

Mama knows I’ve got used to kissing stingers,

sharing my bed with artillery.

Mama knows loving you was an act of hospitality

towards everything I would eventually die of.

I remember it hurt,

the first time my heartbeat synchronised with gunshot,

the first time I shaved glass shards from my skin,

the first time you showed me

how to recycle my severed parts into poetry,

the first time I realized my poems were matchsticks

and I am addicted to the smell of burning.

Or, put more accurately:

This is how long it takes from heartbreak

to feel safe in a silo —

All I know is bearing a heart like mine

can only be an act of faith.

I remember mama telling me:

“Azizati, I know you are angry

and ready to break things,

but please, do not be one of them.”