Aria Aber is a German-Afghani creature based in London, UK. At the moment, she's reading English at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in a variety of online magazines and literary journals. ---------
Root Chakra: A Triptychon
1. Exposition
It all begins and ends with your mother’s hands:
once ripped off a porcelain doll, the picayune limbs
stroked away her father’s death until they, too, grew into
the ends of a surgeon’s arms—war-torn, neuralgic
and calloused, beautifully hurt under a net of nerves
dismantled by terror and that fadeless memory
of you, the firstborn, seamlessly held in those same hands,
somewhere between nymph-milked innocence and new futility.
2. Interlude
What you love, you have to let go: but in that country,
even the garden grew dangers. She kept you small,
she squished you in her fist, but you dispersed as sand
between her fingers. Her from the desert, what did she think?
Your first word was Goodbye and your first step towards the door,
you passed from view past the sea, past and past her.
Instead of homes, you found bodies,
men with hands like your heart: wetted with dishpan skin,
heavy with the sadness of vagabonds and orphanages.
Instead of friends, you found shamans:
they held your hands, but asked for hers.
In her palms lies your future, in the creases your fear.
3. Introspective
If all leads back to the house you grew up in
If all just morphs into the spiraled crystal stair case
backwards into the centre of your abdomen,
where you are welcomed and embalmed warmly
by the silhouettes of mother and father and sister,
then yours is the basement: dark and musky and deserted,
a window in a block of council flats, a broken flower pot
between the vortexes of your spine. Soldiers bleed down
your thighs, protect the root, keep alive the lies.
If all just leads back to that first home, yours
inhabits the mechanical breath of the universe,
as your mother’s desperate hand waves to you:
return, return.