Issue 32: Safaa Fathy
From Foot in the Cordoba maze
Building a platform in ugly places
Plates of Platine within
Bones of ice, skeletons of glass
Lines of stone around a gushing fountain
Do you know that Shireen’s corpse still fights the occupation?
Duende donde dije digo Diego
As I lay on the ineffable wordy horizon
Margret was waiting to be buried.
As I dogged my entrails for lost love
Ramon writes an apology of his shame to the wrong email address.
The hollow mother stares in the space vacuum
Where right in its middle lies the limits of any event
Look beloved past, to where the flower is silenced
Implore me frontwards, where I did face the police and the multiple uniforms, always hopscotching on one single foot,
Entreat me onwards to where I will be not, even upright.
Here now in Cordoba.
–What has ceased?
Hundred years to go and You never come back
************
Under the rainy whereabouts of that sky, there is Europe, middle and away, there is Jerusalem, where I did stay, where the coffin dances on mourners’ feet, where mothers give birth to fatherless sons, where the Andalous dances on its duende and walks on its meres of pouring tears, “Donde dije digo, ahora digo Diego”. Whence do you grow bastard of the sun, bastards of noon?
In the Southern lane beneath the new lune, disappearing, down the solar globes, to whom reverence is due
Forty days of hunger strikes, forty days of a hunger strike, forty nights of grief, forty is the number that begets and bereave.
Shireen’s last road of rain to Jenin cracks into my face to face Coffin to face shoulders hands voices, voiceless face to face armed occupation, among silk Margret is, cashmere, wool, cotton, florae, she awaits inhumation as love has gone within the planet that dangles around Sagittarius A*,
Holds onto the broken bones of Cordoba.
Sat next to a mushroom
A gaze of October
is nothing yet lasted for merely that time
The years are yours; I am far too young to be…,
the clouds that do gather
Into my ever vanishing lucidity.
Sagittarius A*
What a nombre they gave me
or
gave to that black hole in the middle of our galaxy
has it been a loaf of bread
or a spoonful of honey
or a plate of sea weeds
or even pillars that stood there in the colour
infinity has a door and a patio
little stones spread over an ancient city
a fountain springs here and there
yet I have a deal
a bond,
a clear cry
a candle that I lit every day on the altar of a nocebo
cast, cast, caso to cast the hoo ho hoho ho hoho ho hooho ho
fondre, smelt, in one way or another, here it goes the missile, or the shell or the word
then have a walk
a long walk,
6000 steps at least to be fit
***********
Reach the Guadalquivir river, turn right to the mosque, move to where the Maimonides statue sits, go ahead, turn, turn, turn, go past the casa Andalusi, leave it there to its writing workshop and nod farewell to the owner you never met, return back to the Alfonso XIII to the curdled milk, to the silent outrage, to the field of the mother of God, and wait there for your disaster.
************
Just across the faculty of Law Business and Economics has the sounds, resonances, screams hounds, and whispers in the Magdalena. In the Carmen Calzado Convent in Plaza Puerta Nueva . Young mothers died in childbirth and are still crying, there right there in front of the Madre de dios 6. No it is her field not her street. It is a campo and a calle before the Madre de Dios even appear. Go to the roof. Pace the ochre, watch the bones that fall on the Sahara sand, bend not until you fall.
****************************
–Perfecto este cobijo
–fue estableido en el epoca Romana
–Caerse
Who ¿
Who had the line of life and left it to the fall back unto the sea.
In Cordoba there is no sea, there are only feet and toreros.
Ah…HOO Ho, HOO, Ho
The sea is lying in wait, lies in wait, and there has been a line and it did break, beneath, right beneath the versatile oakum.
Go ahead, turn, and turn to the source of las Duenas to whom you now belong. A mother and girl say and you sit, they make you coffee that you drink. They say the procession of the schools goes pas the Duenas and you should assist.
Safaa Fathy was born in Egypt. She is a poet, essay writer and filmmaker. She had her PhD form the Sorbonne University and has been director of programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. Her plays Terror and Ordeal were prefaced by Jacques Derrida, with whom she signed a book, Tourner les mots (partly translated into English by Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania). Her book of poetry Revolution Goes Through Walls (SplitLevel Texts) was first published in Egypt, then in France, and in Brazil. Safaa Fathy’s experimental book of poems entitled Al Haschische is published by Pamenar Press (London, directed by Ghazal Mosadeq2023). Where not to be Born, 2024 is published by Litumus Press NY. Safaa Fathy’s Name to the Sea, a film poem structured within a still frame, is being published along with the text in seven languages (Vanilla planifolia, Mexico City). Safaa Fathy has been writing a novel in English for the past five years.
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