A Love Letter

I want you


                    to remember this 

where I live 
program the coordinates 
into your internal compass
embed the the earth’s magnetic 
field onto your temporal lobe

                    where time and space dwell 
                    as electricity 

shed your armor spell-cast bulletproof
marked with attempts 
on your life
and tattoo a map onto 
your integument
of how to find

                    me

learn to navigate the network
of highways and hidden culverts

                    with your mind’s eye 

a small island 
barely in the Pacific Ocean
10 meager miles off the coast
almost enclosed to an inland sea

                    fly over the land 
                    in your dreams

keep your gas tank full
take the backroads
sleep with your backpack on
don’t take off your shoes
carry water, fire, otc painkillers
at all times 
drive north
until you see
the sun set

                    Ishtar rise in its place

                    don’t stop

I will find the last 
boat to pick you up
or row across the strait 
myself
to bring you 

                    here 
                    if you need me

to give you every penny
of my fuck-you-money 

                    I will

give you stitches 
with the good sewing thread 
I’ve been saving
kiss your bruised 
crown
mend the bone they broke 
for the stone you threw

                    chew 

leaves of bitter Yarrow
my spit binds us together 
your skin closes around the wound


                    I will

offer you my last pack of cigarettes 
or box of bullets 
and still save us each one

                    I will 

boil salt out of our tears
grow a new strain of 
potatoes from seed 
cook you the last salmon 
we will ever catch in our nets 
and cry into the pot 

                    make you a sealskin cape

I find you in The Underworld every night
recite the recipe you shared
for the bitter-melon soup
like a prayer
your people call it Canh Kho Qua 
the “suffering will pass”-soup

                    and the suffering will
                    inevitably come to pass

you are my final phone call 
the last song in the wires

if you get lost 
remember 
our ancestors have already been

                    here

how my Teta packed 
very little for a very long life
in a post-apocalyptic world

                    remember that

we will not live to see
the heat-death of the universe
but we will live together 
through the end of a very small
world

---

Veera Sulaiman is a Finnish Palestinian writer, community organizer, Tatreez artist, and herbalist. Her written work explores the intersections of mixed identity, language, alternate futures, intergenerational memory, animism, art as resistance and propaganda as art. As a daughter and granddaughter of forcibly displaced Palestinian refugees, she is interested in chronicling how our worlds continue to end, and what endures after those calamities.