Rumi R.

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I.

The Girl Who Kept the Dictionary Under Her Pillow

In our village the road ends
where the apricot trees begin
and the apricot trees end
where my father says: enough.

But I have a book.

I found it in the rubble of the old schoolhouse
after the flood took the lower wall-
a dictionary, soaked at the spine,
vowels bleeding into vowels,
the word borderline still legible,
the word beyond still dry.

At night I press my cheek to its pages
the way a woman presses her cheek
to the cold side of a pillow
when sleep will not come.

I am learning the names of rivers
I have not touched.
I am memorizing the distances
between capitals
with the patience of a cartographer
who has never been issued a map.

My mother says: a girl who reads at midnight
is a girl who will not stay.

She is right.

She says it like a warning.
I receive it like a ticket.

Tomorrow the muezzin will call at four
and the fields will expect my hands
and the hands will not refuse.
But tonight I am at the borderline.
Tonight I am on the dry side of beyond.

The dictionary does not know my language.
I am teaching it.

II.

Translator at the Frontier

They gave me a certificate
that says I speak between worlds.
I carry it folded in my pocket
like a border crossing stamped
in a language neither side
fully reads.

In the morning I translate the professor
whose voice arrives from a screen
twelve time zones behind the sun.
I find the word in Uzbek.
I find the word in English.
The word I need is in neither.
It lives in the sound my grandmother made
when she pressed dough into the tawa-
a word for: I am making something
that will not last the day
and that is enough,
and that is everything.

There is no word for that
in the languages that matter
to the people who issue certificates.

So,  I stand at the frontier of meaning
in my village coat,
in my borrowed grammar,
and I build a bridge
out of approximations.

The smuggler of small truths.
The shapeshifter in the dotted line.

On one side: the world I come from,
its mud walls gold at sundown,
its silences deep as wells,
its women who carry water
on their heads like crowns
they were never told
were crowns.

On the other: the page.
White. Waiting.
Immigration officer.
Customs checkpoint.
Asking: what do you declare?

Everything, I say.
All of it.
The apricots and the flood.
The dictionary and the dark.
The dough and the word
that has no English.

I declare the whole
untranslatable country
of being from somewhere
the map considers
a borderland.

III.

Portrait of a Young Writer at the Outer Limit

She writes in the margin
of her brother's old notebook.
There is no other paper.

She writes about the well
and the rope
and the women who came before her
holding the same rope.

She does not write about suffering.
She is not interested in suffering
as a subject.
She is interested in the rope-
its texture, its memory of hands,
the way it shortens
every generation,
so the well feels closer
to the surface
than it used to be.

One day a woman from the city
visits the school
and says: you have something.

The girl goes home
and writes that in the margin too:
you have something.

She turns it over in her mouth
like a stone from the riverbed,
feeling for the smooth side.

She has seen the maps.
She knows where Andijan sits
on the ones that matter:
at the edge, the fold,
where the paper creases
and the ink skips.

She is going to write
from the crease.
She is going to write
in the skipped ink.

The borderland is not a place
she is passing through.

It is her address.

She is the well
and the rope
and the shortening distance.

She is writing her way
to the surface.

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Dr R. Rumi is a Professor at ASIFL, Andijan, a poet and scholar, Uzbekistan, where the Ferghana Valley opens toward every border at once. He teaches literature at the Andijan State Institute of Foreign Languages. His work lives in the space between the languages he was given and the ones he has had to build.