The Shine Journal

A Poem for Grandpa

       
My grandfather fixes the clock
(made of oak and ivory)
everyday at noon.

His withered hands
wind down the hours
and the clock chimes
for a moment.

But it stays broken
(like him)
and he doesn't remember
that he tried to fix it the day before.

As the alcohol and cigarettes
devour his brittle bones
my love for him stands still
(and he fixes the clock again.)
                                       
My heart turns to stone
(and I shrivel up inside)
from the torment of seeing
a once brilliant writer
waste away
Into nothing.

Better Than Ice Cream

Twenty years ago
there stood a parlor
that served ice cream;
the promise of twelve flavors
each better than the next.

We sat united
in the large brown booth
eating the colors of the rainbow
(all seven of them)
like a family should.
                       
Things were simple then
and being there
was all that mattered
because it was safe
and we were one.

But it's gone now -
a faded memory
(ragged and distant)
like my boyhood hopes
and childish expectations.

The parlor's stucco walls
look different (each time
I remember them)
and nothing stays the same.

My memories lie
(as pictures often do)
and I've forgotten
what ice cream tastes like.


Dead Faces

They put us in the same room; all of us with the dead faces. Hospital beds cluttered together. No room to move, no room to breathe. Some were wrapped in bandages; others had their blistering faces exposed. Mine was the worst, I heard the nurses say.

My face smelled like death. Red and raw. No longer pretty. Damaged.

The pain kept me from sleeping. I wanted to cry, but worried the tears might hurt.

It happened yesterday, but it still didn't feel real, even as I lay covered in hospital sheets and bandages. When I first saw the men on motorbikes, I knew something bad was going to happen. They had evil written on their faces, a deep concentration in their eyes, as though they had a goal to fulfill and would stop at nothing to make it happen. They rode toward us, and I tried to react, but my body refused to cooperate. None of the others said anything and I wondered if perhaps I was over-thinking the situation.

We were eleven girls, most of us aged sixteen, and our four teachers, discussing Shakespeare. We were walking to school, as we did every morning, when the men rode up to us, and pointed their guns to our faces. As the guns stared at me I couldn't help thinking how fake they looked, like rubber. The men yelled at us, screaming that Muslim girls shouldn't be educated, calling us their slaves and whores, before spraying liquid into our faces with their pistols. It was at that second I realized the guns weren't real. If I had known that earlier, would I have run?  I asked myself that question many times.

The moment moved slowly for me, the arc of the liquid catching sunlight and inching its way toward me before finally hitting me in the face with a quick splash. I winced and felt a deep burning. Only later when the nurses told me, did I learn the warm liquid was acid.

The men roared away on their bikes as screams filled the air; uncontrollable wails of agony and confusion coming from all of us. The pain hit me then, and I felt my face melt away. A squirt of acid had gone into my eyes, burning my eyelids and blinding my vision. I heard some of the girls run into the school for help. I couldn't see, and fell to the floor, crawling toward the screaming voices, trying to find my way around through memory. Anxious feet stomped over my hands as I crawled. Someone tripped over me and fell with a loud thud, crying out in pain. I struggled to maintain my balance and continued to crawl. I didn't know what else to do.

Finally, I felt strong arms lift me up and carry me away. At first I screamed, but the man was gentle and he comforted me with his words.

“It will be okay," he kept repeating, and I realized then he was a friend, and not the enemy. His voice was too kind to be dangerous.

“Give up," my mother said when she visited me in the hospital. “Or they might kill you."

"No," I told her. “I won't let them win."�

She held onto my hand, squeezing it gently, obviously struggling not to cry. A single tear fell onto my bandaged forehead and drizzled down my scarred face, stinging it.

“Akilah," she breathed, wanting to get words out, but I didn't let her continue with her thoughts because I knew what she was going to say and didn't want to hear it.

“Ummu, I will go to school even if they torture me and try to kill me," I told her. "If they do this 100 times, I am still going to continue with my studies," I said and meant it.

I felt her attempt to speak again, to perhaps try and change my mind, maybe to bring up my father, who had been killed the year before, but I spoke quickly, not allowing her to get in an opinion.

I said, “Even though the men have turned me ugly and have kept me from ever seeing the world again, they cannot take away my ability to learn. I'll need to fight harder to succeed, but I will. Waalidi would have wanted it that way."

Although I couldn't see her, I was sure my mother looked at me, and she worried, because she knew I meant every word. She had seen my father get killed for his ideas and worried the same would happen to me. But despite the smell of fear engulfing her, I sensed her smile, and knew that she was proud of my decision.

BIO: Sahag Gureghian has been a writer since the age of five, when he would adapt fairy tales into his own unique stories. In the fifth grade, he was the only one in class to complete a creative writing assignment correctly, and knew he was destined to become a writer. Sahag took his passion for writing to California State University, Northridge, where he received a double BA in both Creative Writing and Screenwriting. He is currently attending San Diego's National University for an MFA in Creative Writing:Fiction.

MOTIVATION: A Poem for Grandpa came about a few years before my grandfather passed away. He was an alcoholic, and after a while, my family started to hide the alcohol from him so he wouldn't drink anymore, because it was interfering with his ability to function at such an old age. He must have been so bored without his vodka, that he started to 'fix' the old clock in my parents' home numerous times throughout the day, never remembering that it had been broken for years and was unfixable. The poem was a sort of 'tribute' and memory of my grandfather.

Better than Ice Cream was a childhood memory assignment for a writing workshop I was in. The only childhood memory I could recall was the ice cream shoppe where my family would go for banana splits at least once a week. The shoppe is gone now, but the memory of those fun times has stayed with me, and inspired the poem.

Dead Faces came about when I read a heartbreaking newspaper article about a Muslim woman who had acid thrown on her face, simply because she was going to school. I took that incident and crafted a very short story.

"Hands" Image by: Valerio lo Bello