Not far from the border, a mother sits in a

hollow of earth, sheltering from the snow.

Navigating by day away from smokedrifts

over the city {remains}, at night she rests.

She walks the limestone massif through the

Dead Cities of antiquity. Beyond these

forgotten cities, farmlands to the north and

west where the olive and nut trees grow,

orchards abandoned, the earth heavy and

pregnant with unharvested fallen yields.

Hungry, hollow-cheeked and skull-thin, she

moves the tip of her tongue across the velvet

bone of her lower jaw to feel the space

where her wisdom teeth once buried their

roots. Enamel may be the strongest

substance in the body, but even teeth rot.

These roots are not so firm that they can’t be

displaced by metal. The doctor said bone

would grow back over time, and each

passing month the gumflesh swallows the

void, little by little.

Flesh grows back with healthy blood-flow.

Flesh grows back unless you’re dead.

She tongues the root-hollows and tastes the

air — acid that carries for miles with the

wind. She tastes metal on bone, metal on

flesh.

Her body, too, hollow after bearing a child,

born still, and her whole hollow body cries

into the cold of the night, unheard.

In the silence of the hollow {in the stillness

of her womb} echoes of voices, anisotropic,

immeasurable, like the echoes of shells

falling in the city where a grandmother sits

in grey dust // where shrieking echoes of

mortars bounce off the carcasses of

buildings // where the shrieks of children

echo in the streets where bombs fall

indiscriminate // where the children feel it in

their eyes and throats and lungs before they

even know it is raining at all.

In the silence of the hollow, a memory of her

brothers’ voices in the rows of pistachio

trees, seeds closed-mouthed and ripening,

shells splitting, an ecstasy of dehiscence.

She recalls the orchard arteries, trees planted

in parallel avenues, rooted deep like teeth,

lines of gnarly trunks, rough-ridged grey

bark, twisted limbs {like the children falling

in the streets} waxy-leaved, canopy-dense,

fruit-heavy. She recalls the changing colour

of ripening drupes, the soft grey-green

smooth nut inside, soft like the velvet gums

against her tongue inside her hungry mouth

which waters when she thinks of the harvest.

She swallows the saliva, unsated.

She thinks of the harvest, of sorting the nuts,

open-mouthed shells here, closed-mouthed

shells here, the abrupt splitting apart, the

audible pop of hundreds of ripening,

opening seeds in the fertile orchards like

rapid joyous gun-fire. She cannot forget how

the shells fall — in the orchards, in the city,

on the hospital. She cannot forget the cracks

in the citadel walls, or the crack of nutshells

underfoot at harvesttime.

From her shelter in the hollow she draws

lines in the softly falling snow on the frozen

ground, rudimentary map-making, marking

out cities, coastlines and borders. The snow

melts to her touch. She draws slowly, a lover

running her fingers across another body,

tracing blood rivers and sinew paths and

flesh hollows.

Mapping her thoughts, she finds some lines

are organic: natural forms like rivers and

plateaus and mountain ranges. Others are

territorial, made by man, deliberately drawn

and visible, like train tracks and roads and

borders. But the best sort of lines are

invisible to the eye: ley lines and desire lines

and the shortcut she took through the trees to

play with her sisters in the orchard —drawn

by intuition, by routine, by heart— and how

these undrawn lines seemed to her the most

human topographical feature of all.

Not far from the border, a mother sits in a

hollow of earth, sheltering from the snow.

It is night, and the land is nothing more than

a colourless spectrum that spreads itself out

between the black and the white.