special issue 1
// p o e t r y
A Girl Learns Geometry in Afghanistan
by Erwin Arroyo Pérez
The teacher holds the protractor like a gun,
measuring the angles of the girl’s obedience.
She was born in the season where girls keep their heads down,
while the air remains thick with chalk dust.
But the girl refuses to be erased. She drags herself
back to the blackboard and writes her name.
At night, her mother doesn’t chide her,
instead, she stitches algebra into her sleeves.
X is the closest thing to a map; X stands for exile,
for exit, for escape—for a door that won’t open,
for a window too narrow to climb through.
She tells her daughter the story of a caged bird.
‘They clipped its wings before the feathers grew full,
before flight became muscle memory, before
it could learn the weight of its own shadow.’
And once the doors of the cage were open?
Does the bird hesitate at the threshold?
Does it wonder which side of the door is home?
She asks: If a girl steps into the dark,
does she become its echo, or its light?
What do you call a woman without a mouth?
A shadow? A lesson? A nation?
But she knows the answers to these questions—
inside her ribs she keeps a library, book spines
pressing against the doors, padlocked.
Tonight, she uses pencils as crutches,
to hold the fractures of language in place.
Tonight, she writes her dreams on the inside of her eyelids,
so even in sleep, she is rewriting herself.
Tonight, she whispers a question into the dark,
sharp enough to slice a hole in it.
The stars do not answer.
She steps through anyway.
about the author // Erwin Arroyo Pérez
| Erwin Arroyo Pérez (he/him) is the founder and Editor-in-Chief at The Poetry Lighthouse. He also teaches literature and works as a translator in Paris. He holds a Master’s degree in English Literature and Linguistics from Université Paris Nanterre and King’s College London, specialising in Victorian literature and poetry. He has studied under poet Sarah Howe and novelist Benjamin Wood, shaping his approach to creative writing. Erwin’s poetry has been published in Paloma Press, The Nature of Our Times, Respublica Politics, Nanterre University Press, and other American and British literary magazines. |
Website: thepoetrylighthouse.com
Instagram: @erwinarroyo56
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