TATI EL
MALLAH
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THE MAIDEN PROJECT
Who danced in circles wearing womens faces.
Long and pointed,
Painted white with slits for eyes and narrow noses.
Throwing themselves
Professing love to deities
Weeping for their losses.
Agbogho mmwo,
Where husbands and sons and fathers
Entered and basked in the divinely feminine
Celebrating a loss of one of their own.
Of givers of life.
I could float endlessly amongst these bodies.
Cling to them, hold them close to my chest
Search for remnants of what was beautifully genderless
Not until I could look in the mirror and see
The flaking sides of my own woman mask
And slowly started to peel.
This is a tribute to the divinely queer
To those who exist in spaces of the other, of absence,
Of what is labelled transgressive yet sought after.
Those who’s spaces have been cultivated as havens
The maiden
Throws hands to the gods and
Weeps for they are but a self consisting of
Selves, for they see lines
And boundaries
In the sand, and to the
Sand they stretch out a leg and scrape, dust
Spraying an aching body.
A body
That breathes,
A body that moves
One that begs to be many and to be in the
Hands of the other.
The other which dances side by side
In this twisted game, in this
Space where spaces grow
With these hands that spin and feet that feel
The ground below them shift like water
A mask laid upon their face
Yet it feels
To fuse with the skin below,
And in this space where spaces change, they go
Together as one, a flowing channel
Masks that sweep across abysses
Hold each other tightly, drifting in and out of the
Embrace. The masquerade where
For a moment, but a brief moment the audience
Evaporates and it is you, and it is those who
Look back at you and reflect a face so similar
Yet dissimilar to your own. In this
Space where spaces fuse
Where love is undying and unrestrictive, where a
Body is not simply a body, where these strange and
Beautiful minds can be quiet but drop
Words from loose lips. Where
A mask turns to the face you thought you
Hid, and the maiden reaches towards
The line, the blurred and sandy line
Cannot exist in these spaces
For this is a space where
Meaning dies, a
Space where spaces die
The process of concluding is a strange one indeed
To find an answer
To assume all of the thoughts
You’ve splattered on a page into a tiny, intricately spun totality.
I have no desire for this totality,
And no need.
Maiden seeks to give thought to the topic,
To find questions not answers.
Queerness is a position we’re told time and time again,
To justify.
As though love is justifiable,
In doing so we create a narrative.
A falsity, that takes the shape of an identity
That’s a part of it,
That is community.
Arbitrary distinctions and
Less arbitrary ones,
Disagreement but fundamental similarity.
That is what queerness is.
That is what Maiden is.