Luljeta Lleshanaku

I’m waiting for a poem, something rough, not elaborate or out of control, something undisturbed by curses, a white raven released from darkness. Words that come naturally, without aiming at anything, a bullet without a target, warning shots to the sky in newly occupied lands. A poem that will well up in my chest and until it arrives I will listen to my children fighting in the next room and cast my gaze down at the table at an empty glass of milk with a trace of white along its rim my throat wrapped in silver a napkin in a napkin ring waiting for late guests to arrive. . . .

I grew up in a big house where weakness and expressions of joy deserved punishment. And I was raised on the via politica with the grease of yesterday’s glories, a thick grease collected under arctic skies. I was lit up. My notebooks, my hair, my heart reeked of smoke. That’s when we saw each other clearly. Or rather, what remained of us. Damaged like lottery numbers scratched away with a blade. How different we were! Those with round faces were righteous; those with narrow faces were cautious. One listened secretly to Puccini, another to silence, the music’s music. The oldest one declaimed monologues inside a ten-by-ten-foot cell he had built for himself. And the mysterious one simply had diabetes. But how similar we were in severe circumstances! Alarmed like a flock of magpies that the smallest stone sends into the sky toward the mouth of the abyss. Then it became obvious there wasn’t enough space for everyone. We separated. Some went on living in via verbum, telling of what they knew, what they witnessed, and so, through their narrative, creating their own grease. The others crossed over the ocean. And those in particular who went farthest away never speak of their annoying history of wretched survival, burying it in the darkest crevices on their being. Unfortunately, as with perfume, its scent lingers there for much, much longer.

Prisoners guilty or not always look the same when they are released— patriarchs dethroned. This one just passed through the gate head bowed despite not being tall his gestures like a Bedouin’s entering the tent he carried on his back all day long. Cotton curtains, stone walls, the smell of burnt lime take him back to the moment the cold war ended. The other day his sheet was hung up in the courtyard as if to flaunt the blood stain after a wedding night. Faces tarnished by sun surround him, all eyes and ears: “What did you dream of last night?” A prisoner’s dreams are parchment made sacred by its missing passages. His sister is still discovering his odd habits: the bits of bread hidden in pockets and under his bed the relentless chopping of wood for winter. Why this fear? What can be worse than life in prison? Having choices but being unable to choose.

1. I was born on a Tuesday in April. I didn't cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn't even mad. I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude inside the belly for nine months straight. Two workers welded bunk beds at the end of the delivery room. One on top of the other. My universe might have been the white lime ceiling, or the embodiment of Einstein's bent space in the aluminum springs of the bed above that curved toward the center. Neither cold, nor warm. "It was a clear day," my mother told me. It's hard to believe there were a few romantic evenings when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina and red-laced magma decadently peeling off a silver candlestick. Infants' cries and milk fever turned to salt from the stench of bleach— abrasive, unequivocal. With a piece of cloth wrapped on the end of a stick, the janitor casually extends the negative space of the black-and-white tiled floor like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness sieving out new human destinies. 2. 1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the East dumped punctured rice bags, mice and the delirium of the Cultural Revolution. A couple of men in uniform cleared out the church in the middle of the night. The locals saw the priest in the yard wearing only his underwear, shivering from the cold. Their eyes, disillusioned, questioned one another: "Wasn't he the one who pardoned our sins?" Icons burned in front of their eyes, icons and the holy scriptures. Witnesses stepped farther back, as if looking at love letters nobody dared to claim. Crosses were plucked from graves. And from each mouth spilled irreversible promises: mounds of dirt the rains would smooth down sooner or later. Children dragged church bells by the tongue. (Why didn’t they think of this before?) Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly revealing a myriad of nameless stars that chased the crowd like flies on a dead horse. And what could replace Sunday mass now? Women brought cauldrons into the yard. Men filled up their pipes; smoke rose into the air, against gravity's pull. Nails in worn out shoes exposed stigmata that bled in the wrong places— a new code of sanctification, of man, by man. 3. "Read!"—I was told. Who said that? Angel Gabriel, or my first-grade teacher who had dark roots underneath her bleached curls? Language arrived fragmentary split in syllables, spasmodic like code in times of war. "Continue where your classmate left off!" A long sentence tied us to one another without connotation as if inside an idiom. Someone would get to read the noun, another the verb, a third one a pronoun. . . I always got the exclamation mark at the end— a mere grimace, a small curse. A tall cast-iron stove below the portrait of the dictator, puffing smoke from its temples, enough heat for everyone. On the blackboard, leftover diphthongs from yesterday or the day before rubbed against one another like kittens. After dusk, I looked for another language outside the window, my eyes glued to a constellation (they call these types "dreamers") my discovery possibly a journey into the past, toward a galaxy already dead, nonexistent, the kind of news that needs millions of years to reach me. "Read!"—the angel shook me for a third time her finger pointing to an arbitrary word a million light years apart from its object. (It didn't matter who was first). Negative space sketched my onomatopoeic profile of body and shadow in an accidental encounter. 4. Language is erosive. It makes us recluses, a wind through the canyons carving our paleontological eras for everyone to read. Under the revised testament of my skin bellows a gold-cast bull, an alluring object, a need for attention. Then comes the unleavened bread and a last supper, which, remarkably, is repeated several times between ice ages. Lower yet, Sodom. I recognize it from the stench of sulfur. I hold my nose. Freud would have done the same. And then Cain, a crow taught him how to bury his own brother. . . And at the bottom, Adam’s gentlemanlike sin under which scientists discover earlier epochs of famine. Between unidentified layers, wanderings in the sand, the search for a new prophet. . . I try to understand my people. Their language is plain. Some words, were actually never uttered, like pages stuck together in a book fresh off the press and long after it sits on a shelf. This, too, lives inside me within insidious bubbles of air, negative spaces where I can find little historical rest, but also where utter ruin may originate. 5. Little left of the snow three days ago. Its blanket ripped away, exposing dog shit and the bruises of routine. Negative space gives form to the woods and to the mad woman—a silhouette of the goddess Athena wearing a pair of flip flops, an owl on her shoulder. It’s minus zero. The factory’s gate gnashes its teeth behind the back of the last worker. Blowing noses, shivering, mucus. . . A virus circulates through the workplace, secretly, intimately touching one person after another, a current of sensuality. It softens the tone. But nothing unites them more than their frailty, The one-sizes-fits-all shoes you must grow accustomed to By filling the extra space with cotton, Or curling your ill-fitting toes. 6. In Halil’s yard, rules were sacrilege. His eight children entertained themselves by carrying famine on their shoulders, recalling St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin. Starving, filthy, hazel-eyed— three qualities that unexpectedly coalesce in the bright light, strung together like sneezes. One’s famine was another’s consolation. “Look at them! It’s a sin for us to complain. They’re even worse off than us!” But even Halil found his own consolation in the old woman Zyra, “barren and paralyzed,” the root origin of despair. This was our highlands landscape, hierarchical, where each family would make out a different expiration date on the roof below their own. Schadenfreude was the only river that could turn mills. But if this hierarchy shifted, and our roof gave signs of ruin, my mother would plant tulips in the garden, white tulips, our false image, a scarecrow to keep predators away. 7. Nearly nothing was mentioned in the letters he sent from prison, just two lines, on top of the page: “I am well. . .” and “If you can, please send me a pair of woolen socks.” From them, I learned to read between the lines: negative spaces, the unsaid, gestures, insomnia that like a hat’s shadow fails to shade your chin and ears. And in the photographs’ white background, acrophobia adds to the color of their eyes: blue, green, gray, and ultimately, chesnut brown, as, earthward, we lower our gaze. I learned to read the empty spaces the dead left behind—a pair of folded glasses after the reading’s done and discourse commences. Or the musical chairs game called "love," where there are less empty seats than people. If you don’t want to be the last one standing you must predict when the music will stop. (Who, though, has really succeeded?) Perhaps a little practice can be useful in this case. I don’t mean squatting, jumping, stretching, but listening to the same music every day from the start, the same miserable vinyl record so that you’ll recognize its cracks before it recognizes yours. 8. Midnight. Snoring, meaningless sounds that stain the side of the wall that belongs to no one. So where are we? What dimension? Who foots the bill at a time like this without lambs or sinners, when even angels record nothing? The street’s clearly visible under the neon 24-hour-service sign above the funeral home. There was a music shop next to it that closed down a few months ago; the shop shared a wall with the funeral home, shared the same water pipes and the same gate to heaven. But the coffins won, the wide-shouldered coffins that narrow down in the shape of a mummy, not a human. Wood of the highest quality, swears the owner, and pure silk inside, pleated like a stomach that can digest even a bulldozer. When asleep we're simply five limbs. Starfish. If you cut one limb, it will grow back. Even a single limb could recreate us from the beginning, a single hope. Negative space is always fertile. 9. No one knows if it was simply a matter of mixed or some other reason why I used to see what I wasn't supposed to see— the ending of things. It wasn’t a mystical gift, but like a blood clot in the darkness of a vein, I held on to reason, as it circulated from the bottom up and not the other way around as we were told. I used to start from the edges and with my left hand or a croupier’s stick gather the balls and dice from the corners and then watch the bettors as neither a winner nor a loser. There's nothing sillier than watching a film in reverse where after the climax, the protagonists are replaced by circumstances, and circumstances replaced by minor characters, their tongues plastered behind a single, fatal smirk Life and my short lunar calendar slipped away like carbon paper sending off as much light as necessary, skipping the details, the contrast and sharp colors. Lunar time is short. Until the actual end, there are years enough, the negative spaces. What to do with them when the verb has already been uttered, a conclusive sentence with Latin syntax, or more than that: didactic.

Among the personal objects inside a 2100-year-old Chinese tomb, archaeologists found nine acupuncture needles, four gold and five silver. Long before knowing why, ancient doctors knew that pain must be fought with pain. It’s quite simple: an array of needles pricking your arm for a properly functioning heart and lungs. Needles in the feet to ease insomnia and stress. Needles between your eyes to fight infertility. A little pain here, and the effect is felt elsewhere Once, a group of explorers set out to plant a flag on the South Pole, a needle at the heel of the globe, in the middle of nowhere. But before the mission was completed a new world war had begun. The impact of the needle was felt in the world’s brain, in the lobe responsible for short-term memory. When Russia used ideology as acupuncture—a needle over the Urals— it impacted the pancreas and the control of blood sugar: America paid tenfold for whiskey during Prohibition, and at post offices, copies of Joyce’s “immoral”Ulysses were stored for burning. The universe functions as a single body. Stars form lines of needles carefully pinned to a broad hairy back. Their impact is felt in the digestive tract, each day a new beginning. How can you begin a new day not having fully absorbed yesterday’s protein? I was a child when my first teacher mispronounced my last name twice. That pricked me like a needle. A small needle in the earlobe. And suddenly, my vision cleared— I saw poetry, the perfect disguise.