Image: Ilke Kutlay

now and then a berceuse is caught between my incisors. in my neytal vein, i serenade duquende’s sepulchral howl. it has syllables like paper swans, it has a brimstone verse that stirs a controversy worthy of the most spanish red. you strip the winters blue skin off my lips in curls of chantilly lace. every lover i take has the finesse of a feeble-fingered couturier. the woman in the other room is the art of a voice ornamented from liquid gold. i urge you ask me the meaning of another foreign word. you laugh and confess that i am your foreign word. every stanza between us slithers thick as this hip-drummed melody of molasses. a single frangipani on the terrace stirs unkissed. a tired siberian husky rests against my knee. you tell me i soothe the wilderness of your nerves the way water comforts wounds. i speak the salt of andalusia, i speak the whiskey of saudade. i know the gypsy kids with cherry-rimmed cigarettes shock the american pilgrim in you. so, i wait for the eulogy of cicadas, the cannibal quiet of churches, the amethyst robed weeping of the black madonna. yesterday an estonian girl told me that their language had a word which meant the edge of ice. i think of a cantaora’s cries throwing their rope around the horse of a hermetic dark. let all leave with us now. come, amante – the collage of your body, i will peel apart. i have teeth for a heart.

 

duquende – a famous flamenco singer
cantaora – a female flamenco singer
amante – a Spanish term of endearment and respect

     

Scherezade Siobhan

Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo Rroma hack scribbler and social scientist. Her work has been featured, read, performed, danced and sung internationally - in art galleries, journals, rehab centres and bios of okcupid users. She is the author of Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2015) and to dhikr, i (Pyramid Editions, Forthcoming) and is the creator/curator of a global conversation on gendered violence and street harassment, The Mira Project.

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