Safia Elhillo

Poems

i am not polite         i am only inarticulate 

say i was a girl with more triggers than eyelashes

I watch the flood take that room of piecemeal fathers

where I’ve kept them installed for years.

Its debris includes the stories I kept quiet,

everything that was done to me that I will not tell them.

Includes every word tossed about to name women,

how we all thought they didn’t mean me.

I am hungry for touch & ashamed to be looked at

because demur lives inside demure but inside of restive is rest

because i want to contain my own solution

& still they hunt me, still they show their teeth.

I am so tired, I am one thousand years old.