Warsan Shire

Nail Technician as Palm Reader

Language: english
Translations: german (Die Nagelstylistin als Handleserin)

Nail Technician as Palm Reader

The nail technician pushes my cuticles
back, turns my hand over,
stretches the skin on my palm
and says I see your daughters
and their daughters.

That night, in a dream, the first girl emerges
from a slit in my stomach. The scar heals
into a smile. The man I love pulls the stitches out
with his fingernails. We leave black sutures
curling on the side of the bath.

I wake as the second girl crawls
head first up my throat—
a flower, blossoming
out of the hole in my face.

© Warsan Shire
From: unpublished
Audio production: Literaturwerkstatt Berlin, 2015
Categories: birth

Warsan Shire

photo © private
* 01.08.1988, Nairobi, Kenya
lives in: London, United Kingdom
Warsan Shire was born in 1988 in Kenya to Somali parents, she grew up in London, where she still lives. She won her first prize at an international slam event and is now the editor of the magazines Literary arts mashup and Spook. She leads workshops, in which poetry is used as a tool to try to overcome personal traumas.

Her poems have been published and featured in various literary publications, such as the Poetry Review, Magma and Wasafiri as well as have been  featured in the collections Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011) and Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014). Poems of her have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish and Estonian etc. 

photo © private

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