There are nights inside us.

You have to watch out for them.

NICOLE BROSSARD

When I was born, spirits flew from my head,

their fingers stained in noise. They whispered

Souk Ahras Souk Ahras without protecting me

from the lion. In Montréal, the snow deepened

like milk poured over the city, and I was restless.

I refused the breast. I wanted morphine, trauma.

Receding ghosts, venomous little saints

whispering Souk Ahras Souk Ahras

like sand over the city.

Voices reached me from behind the curtain of

sleep. Those whom I would become, far away,

would not let me be.

I fought with faulty weapons. Heads rolled like

clementines, tumbled into the Medjerda.

Awakening.

I arranged the nightmare on a coat hanger.

Emptied the closets of memory one by one.

Sunburned side of the world: I drank my father’s

dreams.

I walked on my hands. My feet had been

chopped off in the middle of the night. By whom,

no one knew, and there was no investigation.

I was an orange girl with a weird name.

I hadn’t been woken up by the red smell, but I

felt my tendons in my dreams.

In the morning, I was stunned to find my feet

gone. I searched everywhere: under blankets

of cold, in my brother’s stomach, in front of

masked faces. Nothing. They were lost.

My father forbade me to look for them.

The children of the Rue de Chasseurs sold

lemonade. I sold my lungs and my name.

Little Wet-Paint Girl. Wherever the century

touched my skin, it erased a little of my colour.

And I let it, like a false mother.

On my birthday, scorpions wormed their way

through the gifts. I unwrapped dolls and stings.

The venom shot arrows into my liver.

A mysterious fever poured into me.

To survive, I kidnapped hope’s children.

That was a mistake.

To this day, one of those mothers hunts me,

escapes from me.

In kindergarten, they nicknamed me chocolat

because I was the brownest girl in the class.

A fennec fox ran down my legs.

My father had kinky hair. Curious people would

pay to touch it.

Did he dress himself in that cloak of shame?

As for me, I don’t dress up anymore. I’m nostalgic

for a lie.

At seven, I read my father’s first name on a form.

I discovered that I’d been spelling it wrong,

confusing z and d. My father wasn’t my father.

A letter separated us.

Where was he hiding? Who was this stranger

who had taken his place?

I put up a missing-person poster in the red-light

district. No one contacted me.

I always search for my father in women’s tombs.

Among tall grass and wasps, I didn’t know the

wind was an hourglass. My innocence amused

the woman next door. Her delight planted

watermelons, pink mouthfuls amidst famine.

We rescued different species, different riddles:

Why does September make you thirsty?

Once born, who stays behind?

The neighbour woman was a theatre.

We grew older, and I lost her by losing myself.

In primary school, a kid told me I was dirty.

For months, I washed away my doubts under

a shower of bleach. Dermis, tissues, muscles,

bones. I rubbed, scraped them all, until my soul

was scoured as white as a tooth.

A tooth in the mouth of my sorrow.

To be no more than snow. And to somehow

still be?

My parents peeled me like a fig. I was a different

fruit each day.

I would continue the motion, peeling away my

colour, my tongue, my roots. At age twenty,

I disappeared from my own story, and later,

the story confirmed my absence. We celebrated,

laughing, a cake of stings and molars.

I became a blank page. I paced the city, sliced it

up like bread. I was escorted by falcons, and I

spoke to them in an inaudible dialect.

Coming across a foreign shape, a pockmark on

the surroundings, I recognized my own skin.

And I continued down my path, peeling my fear

like an apology.

In the courtyard I was digging a secret tunnel to

Souk Ahras. Tulips, bulbs, worms: windows that

I crawled through without shattering reality.

Sometimes my heart slipped up into my throat

with the effort. I chewed on it like an eraser.

A new one would germinate, made of ladybugs

and poppies, and I continued my work. I drank

gulps of clouds and was poisoned.

My flesh fell away, a too-big skirt. The strikes of

the shovel wore me out. I persisted. I wanted to

see the iris of the globe and my uncle inside it.

My parents were preoccupied with my health.

They nursed me with leeches, sermons. I dug

deeper, deeper as if my fate depended on it —

and my fate depended on it.

Holes in the earth, holes in the page: I needed a

life of my own, just one.

An orange tree grew through walls of windows.

I wanted to uproot it, return it to the other side

of the world — Souk Ahras. Impossible. It was

metallic, a mirror.

It grew and grew, demolishing the church, the

school, the train. The countryside transformed

into a huge fruit tree.

I tried to raze it, summoned the titans of denial,

assembled saws for a delicate demolition. It was

all in vain. An orange tree bloomed in the room

of the past.

Resigned, I sat under the tree to rest. It vanished.

I became botanical, more myself than ever before.

I tobogganed all the way to Souk Ahras. Outside,

the storm wrapped the earth like a present.

Hot peppers repelled monsters. I had killed the

violence — ha-ha! — that lay naked in my bedroom.

At bath time, I rinsed myself with turmeric and

felt every breath run down my flanks.

At twilight, the things we miss stroll through

libraries like cats. I emptied trash cans and

memories onto the ground. No one picked

them up.

I waited patiently at the beginning of the story,

alone before the words.

Near the tree-branched swimming pool of my

family tree were syringes.

Sometimes I buried them. At other times, I’d

trade my limbs for these perches. My wooden

leg seemed more myself than the rest of me.

Roots, bark, sap, the branches weighed me,

steady as concrete below.

At twilight the flora came alive, gaining flesh

and free will. A forest of my ancestors stared

while I brushed away my blight and my rust.

I watched them too, hoping through a trance

that my unknown family would kidnap me.

To run away with the family that didn’t exist.

The one that existed was nowhere to be found.

Like that one, I evaporated little by little. Only

my skin resisted. I creamed it with toothpaste,

the difference between painting and transparency.

Something unseen made me chew snakes. I hid

under draped sheets of bronchi, I begged for a

hand and a stump was offered.

My only wrist, floating in Souk Ahras.

My song served as dinner vocal cords and angel

hair. For dessert, my eyes, carob cookies.

After the meal, I left my sun-browned skin on

a coat hook. My nose pressed up against the

memory like a squashed mouse.

And my mouth? What is a mouth, anyway?

My disappearance began again.

How to run away: escape not with the cat, but

within the cat. In a purr. Shinny up the ladder

of a meow.

Gnaw at parasites, hunt epidemics and rats.

Leave hairs all over October, moulting: turtle-

scale, claws, freedom.

And before dozing off curled like a fetus, gaze

with cat’s eyes

at the poem burning like a little girl.

The executioner cut me in two. I woke up with

fig branches for arms.

I examined the stumps for a while. I didn’t lie

down, neither on the table nor on the clay earth.

A sightless eye watched me, and I felt it leaving

scars on my cheeks.

I know nothing of crime or my stolen share.

I want the share that isn’t held responsible.

In a toy box, I search for her headless body.

Mother without elbows, father without knees,

and I couldn’t colour in my own name. I was

borderless on the map of a face.

Outside the lie seduced the truth. They both

flung clumps of cartilage at human walls.

Bruises, graffiti.

I needed to scream, scream, but I had neither

voice nor I.

I tried to learn my father’s language. The sounds

leapt from my lips, atomic jackrabbits. I tried to

pronounce my first name. You’re saying it wrong.

I persevered. I had to puncture the cornea of

these words.

The language remained a memory. My father

shouted it down my throat. I was afraid of it, and

afraid of the white plates that shattered against

the kitchen floor.

My voice was cut out. I forgot how to use it.

I kept speaking like a bonfire.

I scribbled poems in my mother’s room. I couldn’t

write anywhere else, inside my secrets or my

father’s exile.

That room isn’t a place anymore. Nostalgia

destroyed the furniture, and the blue horse lies

buried.

I got older. My hand no longer existed.

I still write within my mother’s body.

Each morning, I received mail from Souk Ahras.

A family made of ink saved me from denial.

The envelope seemed thin and the address

nonsense: Rue des Chasseurs, where fairies

stumbled.

At night, as soon as my parents passed away,

two parts of me made love without touching,

like dragonflies. Trembling, I sealed the empty

envelope that I mailed to myself.

Then I fell asleep, heart intact, at the very least.

At age eleven, I opened a letter from Caroline,

who was born in Souk Ahras to an Arab mother

and Québécois father. I had sent the letter.

I acted out her part.

Caroline didn’t speak French, and no one

understood where her name was from.

Her hands were nothing but wrists. Her parents

had cut them off at birth so she could never write.

She would write anyhow.

She was a psychiatrist over there. There, that

meant nothing. There, no one ever turned out to

be sick.

I thought about Caroline, I played with Caroline,

I became Caroline, both impossible and necessary

like unicorns, God, and fairy tales.

Like prayers whispered to no one

are to the mother.

In a house of grey and turquoise, there were

no mirrors. No one could see their own face,

no one had a face, and seeing was not the same

as feeling.

Outside, infinite reflections laughed. Store-

mirrors, shrub-mirrors, neighbour-mirrors

watched me. I became a girl.

I melted under it all, half human and half sorbet.

The mirror ripped the ligaments from my soul,

butchering me like moose meat.

Trapped in that house, I lived in fear that my

real name would be revealed.

In the whole city, only one house had walls.

They called it the cemetery. My family lived there.

The walls. They had seen Algeria. You could

also find them among ruins, among wars. And in

Germany, where my parents would get married.

Kisses by the thousands, like bullets, shredded

into the women who wanted those bricks torn

down.

Today my parents are divorced, and my childhood

home isn’t a home anymore, just walls.

I’m not there anymore, either.

Camellias of consonants, imaginary date-palms . . .

did I write this garden?

I touched fables of crystal. I swam to the surface

of the heart. Someone somewhere built a vault.

I didn’t help.

Someone else stole me in the night. Not a thing,

me. I discovered the thief. It was me.

A tale buried in the nerves of the father.

He is buried, too.

My nails grow into my father’s body. I traced my

first words in his shadow, inserted mistakes into

our names.

On his temples I drew my first sketches: our

legless ancestors, snowy lions. Illusions more

solid than the void.

A family of seashells.

Inside the little girl everything crumbled:

her collarbones ripped through her lungs.

Her organs burst, grew back, and were

destroyed again.

She had to cling to her face so it wouldn’t spill,

spreading like wine over the world.

We have to love the things that fall.

The trip had to happen. I packed my bags: cages,

skin grafts, and the coffin that followed me like

a mother.

Did my family recognize me? Were they still

living, or had they succumbed to the enigma?

I didn’t go.

My childhood lives inside this unbreakable vase

that I’ll never glue back together.