Stories that I Must Open Fatima, I see how you touch the night as though it has stolen something from you. I have been there once, felt it pull something from the crevices of my joints when, at the checkpoint, the police officer kept searching my pocket as if I hid a country in it, an AK-47 over his shoulder, swinging back and forth. At the airport, the immigration officer waltzed inside my kaftan to see if somehow there was 9/11 embroidered on it. Happiness is a door that opens into sorrow. Even the smile that tiptoed the edge of my lips was a man stranded at the border of a strange town. I called the stars a map, a road and the sky was set on fire. Whatever joy morning promised is a poem left unfinished; the sun beaming on a small village in Plateau where the charred bones of burnt girls becoming one with the sand have also become stories that I must open. True Story Even though we had left early, something still followed us; the trail of blood from last night?s attack, smoke slicing through dawn?s waking eyes, houses razed down, yellow futures smothered into char?their eyes once shimmering with color now full of surrender.

We ran into the unfurling dawn. Dew drops perched on our clothes like resting birds and soaked into our skin until we were heavy with sky water. Everything pointed back to our burnt home; the feel of wet air crawling inside us. The moon curved above our heads like a capsized boat. Cocks crowed the unfolding of chaos. What we lost cannot be named. What survived that night only survived broken. We did not want to look back.

We did not want to remember that which begged to be forgotten. Memory sat caged inside our bones. We wore our sorrows like funeral clothes, trudging through steep paths, hiding from the main road where a blockade had been made, where men who knew little about God searched through cars for unbelievers. We lifted our lanterns and the road to the next village brightened in front of us. We hoped there was safety waiting for us there. I wish I could tell you we had escaped, but that we are alive means we will always light candles for those who became wind, means we will always carry in our eyes the remains of those who got held back by night. Of what use is such escape? I never thought I?d be back here. The night air is still the same, the smell of tsire twirls inside it.

Not too far from me, men spray mats under a tree, resting, and whispering stories into the soft covers of darkness. Alhamdulillah, there?s calmness in the city?s vein yet something is telling me to run, something is telling me to force open dawn?s mouth and hide.