Landscape Genocide

Landscape Genocide Ladan Osman (bio) I slept thinking of Lido beach, how my mother walked thereevery morning when pregnant with me. I know the mineral scentof seawater wherever I am. If the sun bakes the metal of earth,if my own damp scalp sweats, if I hold my hennaed palmsto my face. I have said, “God. There is no god but God”into my metallic palms. When my blood started, war started.Ever since the war started, I dye a henna disk on each palm.I refresh it when it browns, old blood. “God,” into my mineralpalms when the whole street was white sheets, thin mendigging graves night til dawn til night til dawn. They pausedfor every single prayer. I woke thinking of an orb of light.It dragged me through a dim street. It lifted me off my feet.I shouted “This is my light!” and held it tight against my belly.I was still, beyond known stillness, a gravity of my own,and still I didn’t light the street. I woke thinking of Lido beach.The last thing my mother promised me was a photo of her,five months pregnant, at the shore, backlit by the ocean.“Go at dawn,” she’d say. The water was warmest at dawn.At dawn, girls went to the sea in whatever they were wearing,even if they had school later. Their mothers couldn’t keep themfrom the water, from walking fully dressed into it.I woke up thinking there was nowhere to go but Lido,that the orb, a giant marble in my diaphragm, would floatwith me there. There was nowhere to go but into the sea.Between this interior desert and the sea at the edgeof my known world, orange pekoe tinted sandmarked with the heels and balls of firm and dazed feet.Charred acacias facedown in the dust. Succulentsmarking clusters of graves. Graves of peopleand fruit-bearing trees. Bones of tall livestock,the startling domes of camel ribs lit like a great hallby the relentless sun. There is nowhere to go but the sea.Between here and its mineral scent, bones of people,small and not small, bush lions and their young,always litters of bones at the line between known [End Page 305] and wild worlds. Between here and Lido, the landin full prostration. The only song, metallic. Shells,or whole bullets underfoot, sometimes whole pilesat the edge and center of towns put facedownat night, at dawn, during afternoon prayer, at dusk.Between here and Lido, the land and everythingin it, in full submission to the mineral scentof our water and blood and inability to cry anything,not even “God! No god but God!” We go at dawn. [End Page 306] Ladan Osman LADAN OSMAN was born in Somalia and reared in Columbus, Ohio. She graduated from Ohio’s Otterbein University and later received the MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. In addition to publishing in such periodicals as Apogee, Prairie Schooner, and Transition, she is author of The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, which, as a manuscript, won the 2014 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and was published the next year by the University of Nebraska. In 2014, her chapbook Ordinary Heaven was selected as a text to be published in Seven New Generation African Poets (Slapering Hol Press, 2014), a box set project supported by the African Poetry Book Fund. She is currently a resident of Chicago. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

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  Open Access•Miha Mlinar, Sneža Tecco Hvala•Arheološki vestnik•2022

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