His family are all born backwards: from prophets to traitors, then martyrs—as if anyone could forget the pregnant wadi of grapes or who turned them into wine. Lately, he sells light, pulling my windows and balconies open, offering me the sweetest bits of a summer watermelon. Sometimes I wonder how he breaks through its shell—parting it like unpinned hair, thick and stubborn as a water moon. The blood cradles him, recognises and loves him. I’m always mopping the floors after he’s had a bad day, when he lets the blood unclot, pulling itself into a river, the width of a paltry lake on my clean floors. 

Whenever he pulls the windows open, I climb out and straddle the clouds, pretend I’m giving birth to our fifth daughter. All this man has are girls. It’s my fault for the entire year when our tongues were still new and fresh. I kept calling him on top of the cotton bedding. He swears one day we will bear a son, but I think one of the girls will pledge herself to the moon and leave our country for Greece, all sea and always hungry. Her tongue is just like her father’s, that’s how I know she’ll kiss the shell of other girls too sweetly. It’s all about giving them a grave at the end. Keep pulling the earth to make space for the next layer of dead. 

He and I, we’re from split ends of the country. I’ve watched his heavy accent cleave a soldier into two, then four with every ق. He splits them open like his grandfather sowed the land. I dilute the sea and sun, so when a soldier comes, I dice them in their dreams ‘til they hang themselves. The snakes are all that’s left of their blood. But that’s not true, I tell my daughters. The snakes erupted from Hawa after every birth—pardon my language—and like Maryam are our mothers. 

If you pull enough from the sea or a man steals too much from you, shrinking you like lo mein going bad, then they come to remind our countrymen whose blood reaps. It’s all a haunting, I tell my daughters. Your father may have cheekbones of glass and is mirrored in Issa’s gaze, but he’s still a man. Never forget that. You need to burn his family name and steal his village, sliver it so he loses his origin and calls on you, like an orphaned bastard. Then, he’ll learn to appreciate names—the same way he appreciates flesh: how he curls himself, all blue and bloodied, grasping a nipple in his mouth like he’s half-asleep and rests atop my breasts. Men love anything that shines. Sometimes I wish they could see the look on their father’s face when my legs are wrenched and locked around his back and his hand, dense with sinewy muscle like a gun, has my throat bent backwards. I tell our daughters to swallow pearls every time we go to the sea, so as to never be forsaken. A cut of eternity flooding their atoms with every gem. 

If you ever cry too much, he tells our beautiful daughters, the sea will come and make an angel of you. Do you want Baba to be left alone? One day Mama will leave me. Ha! As if I haven’t been kneading this man’s bread since we were in our twenties, suckling leaves and fresh pits off my grandfather’s mango tree. The great thing about my country, your grandfather’s country, I tell our halo-kissed daughters, is that we have endless water that cuts the world so we can grow in the rain, sprouting as tall as our rice. He loves that. The blessing of my mouth when we kiss. How each fracture of our being pulls us into a breaking light.