"She who lived in the house before me" - Rasha Omran, extracts

In a big city, a woman lives in an apartment where the ghostly presence of its former tenant is always palpable. A poem about solitude and growing old, about a femininity wounded both by its past and by the dead ends of the present, it turns the word into the main feeling of existence. “If I had lived in the house before her/I would have done the same/I would have removed the oeil-de-boeuf from the front door/And left an open hole instead/So that everyone’s eye could/Spy/On my solitude.”