Words and photo: Isabel del Rio
Counting what goes on is one way of keeping everything under control, under wraps, under your breath. We accumulate by counting, discard by counting, refuse or accept by counting. Numbering all your failures, enumerating your disappointments, tallying your discontents. Age is counted, but it is more like a countdown. And while your days are numbered, you will always be more than the sum of your parts.
هي الحرب
العدّ والعدّ والعدّ. نعدّ ما يحدث هو إحدى الإجراءات التي تُبقي على الأحداث تحت السيطرة. مغلّفة. ودون مستوى التنفس. نجمّع الأشياء بعدّها، وننبذها بالعدّ، نرفضها أو نقبلها بالعدّ. تُعدد فشلك وتُحصي خذلانك وتُفرز استياءك. العمر محسوبٌ إلاّ أنّه ضمن العد التنازلي. وما دامت أيامك معدودة فلن تكون إلاّ مجموع كليّ لأجزاء (المتناثرة).
one flowers as hand-me-downs, love as plunder two the time you spoke up and lit the landscape, even in passing no one ever mentioned that you had some kind of chance three conflict is a sought-after trait first thing in the morning, despite the many years together you are still someone I met one day four ask yourself in plain English: are you ready to go to war, belonging to a splinter faction will also do the trick five most are held back by sayings such as: throwing caution to the wind; of course you have a score to settle, of course you missed the boat six my shadow was always more eloquent than I could ever be; dusk obliterates everything in its path without so much as a blink seven except for a shell or a shard, you will take nothing with you when you go, words mostly lose their fragrance once spoken eight being nice is a role you undertook against your better judgment, alchemy can happen at any moment in the middle of a sentence nine calling things by their name also means calling names, the silence of the aftershock happens on the hour ten that unrequited version of myself was very much lost in translation, dawn is not necessarily the start of anything at all---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Material should not be published in another periodical before at least one year has elapsed since publication in Whispering Dialogue. *أن لا يكون النص قد تم نشره في أي صحيفة أو موقع أليكتروني على الأقل (لمدة سنة) من تاريخ النشر. *All content © 2021 Whispering Dialogue or respective authors and publishers, and may not be used elsewhere without written permission. جميع الحقوق محفوظة للناشر الرسمي لدورية (هَمْس الحِوار) Whispering Dialogue ولا يجوز إعادة النشر في أيّة دورية أخرى دون أخذ الإذن من الناشر مع الشكر الجزيل
