Hedy Habra
Stepping into Mirrors
Jylian Gustlin
Stepping into mirrors is diving in deep sea.
Would the sea withhold the memory of sunken
bodies, bodies of migrants hoping to reach the shore?
Would mirrors remember familiar faces first
thing in the morning, the startled look before
the reassuring makeup, the daily questioning?
Would mirrors record the roundness of breasts
and their gradual falling, observe how curves
rouse when rubbed with scented essential oils?
Would mirrors bring to life my mother’s early
ritual, features clouded by Coty’s Muguet des Bois
fluffy puff, carefully outlining lips and eyebrows?
Would shards of shattered mirrors stamp severed
limbs, blood-soaked shirts, dust-covered skin, serve as
fingerprints for not turning the page, or swerve after cleanup?
Would the reflection subside forever, leave an
imprint outside of our own mind, coded messages
for us to retrieve from the other side of the mirror?
Would the sea withhold the memory of sunken bodies,
bodies of migrants hoping against odds to reach the shore?
Stepping into mirrors is diving in deep sea.
Or Do We Ever Learn to Find the Key to Our Own Scribbling?
We jot down sparse lines to forget words spewed out like fire breathing
plumes, try to erase our trails, kneel down, wiping each footstep with long
feathers as we move forward. By erasing shadows so well, we no longer
recognize our own, and watch how signs run as rivers branching out in
streams, echoed here and there throughout the pages.
Like a gold digger following veins embedded as threads within quartz rock
or disseminated in silicified limestone we scan our lives, turn the hour hand
to unearth leitmotivs, dilating encounters steeped in blue, frozen within a
cave or a basement, a mansard or an attic hoarding our dreams. Bent over
our own reflection, we crawl like infants to find the crumbs left at our
passage.
Hall of Mirrors
First, there’s the mirror of memory: you only need
to refuel it with lies and illusions, project it onto a
screen, winding up sequences of animated scenes at will.
In the dormant well of memory
you seek yourself and lose yourself,
sit for hours on the polished lip of the well as you
meditate over your lengthening shadow, perform a
makeover of the mind to erase the ravages of time:
a touch of blush over cheekbones blurs gravity lines,
tilts features upwards, and if this fails, a few hours
of sleep should put a glimmer in the eyes, redress
drooping eyelids, avoid the unsightly X-rays of your mortality.
Then comes the mirror of forgetfulness: swallowing bit
by bit your selective memory, stretching time and space,
a fluid mirror clouded with ripples, rippling memories
the elusive mirror in which
you drown night after night
searching for answers to the same questions. You
wish to turn nightmares into Paradise, sleep paralysis
overcomes you as past and future merge on their own
terms, choose their own colors, glide in swift motion,
deafening rhythmic steps resound in premonition,
emerge erratically from the recesses of your mind,
inaudible tunes fall, scatter like the last leaves of autumn.
Hedy Habra has authored two poetry collections, Under Brushstrokes, finalist for the USA Best Book Award and the International Book Award, and Tea in Heliopolis, winner of the USA Best Book Award and finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American National Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. A recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Awards, she was eight-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work appears in Cimarron Review, The Bitter Oleander, Blue Fifth Review, Cider Press Review, Drunken Boat, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Gargoyle, Nimrod, Poet Lore, World Literature Today and Verse Daily. Her website is hedyhabra.com