LOVE Poem: The Collector of Nothing, by Aref Moallemi

We had agreed to embrace—
so why have you crucified me?

How many hammers
sang cuneiform songs into my palms,
so that the blows on ligament and bone
might become melodies for your rituals?

You dance in Arabic—
and remain unclear.
Our translation of each other falters,
when all I meant by dance
was a justification
for the stuttering of my seizures.

My fingers,
seeking kinship with nails,
began practicing how to become wood.

This could’ve been
just a simple wooden frame—
yet without a photo,
it is more arresting.

The nails are my blood brothers.
If I were to
tear
them
off—

a collection of nothing
would open its mouth
and devour me.

Devouring—
the deepest form of an embrace.

Now that wood has grown into my body,
is this union
a graft—
or a violation?

My hollows, in order to survive,
have accepted their emptiness.
They believe
their inner voids
can be filled—
lost, maybe—
but not gone.

Then why do your fingers
slide into my holes
as if to play a flute,
while I lie forgotten
behind long, sustained notes?

You crucify me—
and now I understand scarecrows.
Each scarecrow is a corpse
of a dance.
If you opened the cracks in their wooden skin,
you wouldn’t see a heart—
only a womb,
the first witness to the tale.

C
|
R _ O _ S
|
|
S

Still hoping the cross’s intersection
is where my heart lies—
every beat of it
was meant to shake the cage.

But my heart
gave life to the bars.

With half my body flesh, half wood,
I became a carpenter
born of trees.

I seek no wood—
except
my own trunk.

Aref Moallemi