Nora Nadjarian

Undoing my Hex

The witch bottle isn’t big enough for what I want to put in it. Your shadow. Hair of the rug bought in a Tel Aviv market, it still tickles my heart. A snippet of a dream where we lie on grass, languishing, where Enter: your wife. Have you quite finished? she asks. I mix in some words from my mouth, half-words, because I’m mumbling. A pinch of salt, broken charcoal, incense, crisp blue egg-shells. A thimble-full of bottle-green sea water, a plucked peacock feather, the eyes of a dove. Anything to fill the emptiness. Anything racked from memory, the potion will make me retch. There’s this rule that forbids you from calling an ex after-hours, it is bad manners. I offer the bottle baksheesh, a little tip, at the end. A smear of blood from the termination.

Nora Nadjarian is a poet and writer from Cyprus. She has won prizes or been commended in numerous international competitions including the Plough Poetry Prize, Poetry on the Lake, the Live Canon International Poetry Competition and Mslexia. Her work was included in Being Human (Bloodaxe Books), The Stony Thursday Book, Atrium, Raceme, Poetry International and Ink Sweat & Tears. In 2022 she won the Anthropocene Valentine’s Day poetry competition and was involved in a Poetry Society/EUNIC project where she produced new work in collaboration with Jacqueline Saphra. Her poetry collection Iktsuarpok will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2023.