Reading from Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus festival, 2012.

Translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa:
 
Amina
 
You order beer by phone
with the confidence of a woman who knows three languages
and who weaves words into unexpected contexts.
 
How did you find this sense of security
as if you’d never left your father’s house?
Why does your presence provoke this destructiveness
that is completely free of intent,
this gravity
that releases my senses from their darkness?
What else should I do
when a shared hotel room offers me
a perfect friend
except to lump my unrefined manners and fling them
at her face as a crudeness I have contrived?
 
Go ahead, amuse yourself.
I am fair.
I’ll let you have more than half the room’s oxygen
on the condition that you see me beyond comparisons,
you who are twenty years older than my mother.
You wear bright colours
and will never grow old.
 
My perfect friend,
why don’t you leave now.
Perhaps I’ll open the grey wardrobes
and try on your stylish things.
 
Why don’t you go
and leave me all the room’s oxygen.
The void of your absence may lead me
To bite my lip in despair
as I look at your toothbrush,
familiar... and wet.