Editor's Note:
Leafing through the four past editions of the aleph review, I chose the first part of ‘coraje’ from Volume 2 because its lyrical lines express the mood of the times and its title reflects what we need to live through the times of Covid19: courage.
Ilona Yusuf
coraje
by Scherezade Siobhan
You sing at the burning angle of an aria that storms the stained glass of church windows to a pool of kaleidoscopic dust. Not all have that flaxen, bent ear of barley humming into the twilight. Not all can love this vulgar music of delirium; this chorus of havoc; these lantern fly nocturnes sparkling the sloe smoke over the quicksand. This is not a concert hall for polite acoustics. The cymbals here are ghosts of snow in leopards. The guitar is the gondola for Hades. In flamenco, we say “desgarro”. To touch only to tatter. Not all can oar through the moss of a night the colour of muscadine, the smell of coyotes. Not all are looking for cobras to charm. Not all dare enter the requiem of this river; its sleeping snakes, the fish of Osiris. Not all know the difference between drowning & dreaming.
Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo-Roma social scientist, community catalyst and hack scribbler of two poetry collections:Bone, Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015) and Father, Husband (Salopress, 2016); and one poetry pamphlet, to dhikr, i (Pyramid Editions, 2017). She is the creator and curator of The Mira Project, a global, cross-cultural dialogue which uses expressive art and storytelling to dismantle gendered violence and street harassment. Her work is featured or is forthcoming in Feministing, Berfrois, Rattle, DIAGRAM, Queen Mob’s Teahouse andWord Riot, among other digital and print publications, anthologies, exhibitions, art galleries—sometimes even in the bios of okcupid users. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee for writing and can be found squeeing about militant bunnies at www.zaharaesque.com or @zaharaesque on Twitter and Facebook.