Hedy Habra is the author of a poetry collection, Tea in Heliopolis (Press 53 2013) that was named finalist for the 2014 International Book Award, a story collection, Flying Carpets (Interlink 2013), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention in Fiction, and finalist for the 2014 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including Connotation Press, Poetic Diversity, Blue Five Notebook, Nimrod, The New York Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Diode, Cutthroat, The Bitter Oleander, Puerto del Sol, Cider Press Review and Poet Lore. She lives in Kalamazoo, has a passion for painting, and teaches Spanish at Western Michigan University. ---------
The Half-Open Door
After Ceremonia, by Fernando de Szyszlo Let me explain that need for blue: we have dissolved into a scarce geometry, illusions erased line by line, and what is left is the tediousness of morning coffee ritual before sliding into invisible cubicles. Can’t you see we have lost our shadow? We have vanished into straight lines and become an outline.
Only when we meet in that isolated place do our shapes appear as we once were. Sacred ashes come from the dust gathered under our soles on the long way here, in search for the mystery of an early evening bleeding in blue hues, the secrecy of empty walls on which to engrave our names, to shelter us from the passing of time.
We leave the door ajar, the half-open door casts a cone of light over the floor, an intrusive presence in the unlit room reaching us in the dark corner where we think we are secluded prisoners unable to escape the threshold of death, imagine our hands tied behind our backs, reaching out only with an invented alphabet as an amulet to remember our time together.
All tales we tell ourselves, reinventing myths floating in incense, passageways to memory linked to the slightest touch as we submit to the painter’s brush in this simulacrum of transgression.