Clara-Læïla Laudette
on my aunt’s face is stapled across
with stitch lines. Her husband put it there.
In my gran’s bones a want of calcium:
my grandad drew it out, ten times,
maybe more. Now she limps
on the gnawed pistons of her hips.
My cousins who are boys
sit in a silent row of radiant phones.
They sit and food is brought to them.
It is always a woman bringing them dishes
and today the woman is me.
My mother’s cousin smooths his beard along his robe
and shuts his women’s faces
behind black squares of devotion.
On Eid they go from house to house,
sit like dignitaries, depart once they’ve been fed.
They ask their hosts to leave the room
so their women can lift shutters and eat.
My mother’s other cousin is the first
— was, for years, the only —
woman taxi driver in Marrakesh.
Her name is Hourriya, meaning freedom,
or so I think until my mother lifts
the horsepower my tongue
drove through the word’s centre;
tells me her name is Houria, meaning
virgin of paradise.
But what is their role?
The bone of me knows already.
My mother looks out the window.
Aside from man’s pleasure, I don’t know.
Clara-Læïla Laudette is a writer, journalist and facilitator. She won Magma Judge’s Prize, placed third in the Poetry London Prize and was shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The Poetry Review, Propel, Beloit Poetry Journal, fourteen poems, Ink Sweat & Tears and Wet Grain, among others.
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