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You are Under my Skin Poetry Book by Suzie Toumeh

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who my body belonged to

Come in. I won’t ask what you survived. I won’t ask what you left behind. But if you want you can place your weight, your wait here. Next to mine. I didn’t draw this page from above, but from within. From the surgical table. From the dream. From a moment I didn't know if my body beloned to the sickness or to the system or to the silence. I drew it. I remember every line. The way I trembled at the edge of the breast, not from fear but from knowing it might be looked at by eyes that have never seen a body Not even their own I made the black line across the boy’s face because I knew he would never be whole again just like me. I am the one who wrote “tell me, my love, what can I do?” a thousand times in the background a glitch in language. Because I knew there would never be an answer that didn’t require a wound. I drew the pack of pills on the skin because that’s what they do they put the prescription inside the girl and call it care. They rename pain into dosages and wond...

A Journey Through Grief

A Drawing Born from Loss In July 2018, I returned from my grandmother’s funeral carrying a weight I could not name. The village burial was over. Family had dispersed. I came home with grief, and guilt for not weeping enough, for drifting away from religion, for leaving too soon. The silence in the presence of these feelings was louder than any prayer. I opened my journal. No plan. No audience. On one page, I began to draw the Virgin Mary from my family's Green Orthodox Tradition. On the page, I started to write a verse I had heard my grandmother preach over and over. The pen became my way of mourning, and the paper became the grave I can visit. This act was a way to give myself the care my mind needed that I could not or did not know how to ask for in words. Art as a Safe Haven I learned to draw in secrecy. In Syria, I copied saints from church walls, borrowed book illustrations, and invented characters to hold feelings I could not name. My sketchbooks hid under my bed, filled ...

The Art of Noticing

The passerby souls, clumsy galaxies on two legs, the ones who think they’re invisible just because they bought new shoes. of course I read them when they walk by. I read the way the old man clutches his plastic bag like it's a holy relic. I read the girl chewing her gum like she’s fighting wiht her father’s ghost. I read the mother fixing her son's collar, already mourning the day he will leave her. I read the boy pretending not to cry when his football gets stuck on the roof. My mind never stops. I read the blink, every shuffle, every scratch of the back of the neck like a Morse code of loneliness and lust and leftover hope. لو تنتبه even their jeans speak. even their umbrellas confess details about their next breath. and then the whole street hums like a broken violin string, I read like scripture: "Here, too, we tried. Here, too, we failed. Here, too, we lived." why am I obssesd with that? لأن العالم ما كتب لي قصيدة، ...

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Suzie TOUMEH