Happy Deathday!
HAJER REQUIQ
My daughter is turning eighteen this June, which means she will rip pieces of herself and gift-wrap them to a strange man, which means she will be shopping for luban hearts because she is all out of things to chew, which means she will be moving out to a different house where the thud of her breaking isn’t the first sound she wakes up to, which means she will be over-spraying herself with perfume because she doesn’t want to smell of war when the boy drops by, which means she will be making room for history in her bed until she stops coughing up carcasses in her sleep, which means no man will be tongue enough to lick up the bombed buildings from her skin, which means she will be curling her fist around home until it stops bleeding into her, which means her chest will be an ottoman for a country that couldn’t stand erect and her legs a border passage for boys who yearn to be men, which means she has been assigned a sack of scars and scalpels at birth instead of a name, which means womanhood bared its teeth long after blackness had caused all the bite marks.
Hajer Requiq is an emerging female poet from Tunisia, who has recently been selected as a finalist in the 2025 Lucky Jefferson Poetry Contest, shortlisted for the 2025 Foster Poetry Prize, and nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize by DMQ Review. She has also been selected as the runner-up for the "Connective | Uncontainable" Fall 2025 Writing Contest by The Capilano Review, as highly commended in the 2026 Cúirt New Writing Prize, and longlisted for the 2025 Gearhart Poetry Contest by Southeast Review. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland, Chestnut Review, and Only Poems, among others.
