Safar

For my beloved,

A. You get me through,
B. to get me through.

A. ​Sahib​; A Companion.
B. ​Safar;​ A Journey.

There are certain places I can’t sleep,
rooms I can’t enter, corridors I don’t walk.

Even if the building
was demolished and rebuilt
the longitude and latitude of memory
knows the gateways to a new burn,
in the same old place.

Precision is a method. I know
exactly where the light struck in
a room before it burned down. I keep
two words on my tongue:

A. Sahib; A Companion.
B. Safar; A Journey.

A. You got me through,
B. to get me through.

Abduls Voice

Abdul’s voice recites:

Sacrifice and love, these are armless hugs/ you ought to praise your color of skin like molton brown rock/ the rusting light in the smoking fog / those little rabbits with white tails scurrying away too fast/ the bee sting in the bottom of your boot/ on the bone of your foot/ the cactus hair (nature’s knife) prickling a new pain/ the moons blue halo bleeding over the mountains / returning, returning, returning/ a glow-

This is how I was reborn to remember
”here I am”
with all the heart in my story / all the story in my heart

Time is for returning;

to the first dream/ I ever saw​/ ​as a child, where the black crow was not a bad omen/
just another bird/ you might throw bread/

here we return/ to the logic of love/ all of it’s resolve/

Abdul taught me first-

about the tenderness of living/ how to scribble on a rock/ so that I might rest in peace
/so that I might write a poem/ so that I might throw a crow/ a crumb

A Funeral At The Mosque

I went to a funeral at the mosque,
where shame draped
the family in white linen.
Pigeons picked on crumbs and
white lies about
the method of death, ‘it was
a car - no it was in a car’,

and my heart decided, the way
in which one dies is irrelevant

/if one is dead.

Still, I fall on both knees some nights -
submitting to
limpness. Sucking
on ice that cuts my throat, slides
down to rest in the stomach; sending
up the shivers of winter

/every June.

Moth Chewing Cloth

Flowers exhale a lullaby-

“One morning in September
a rumble came, when I didn’t know-
the life in me,

that could quietly grow.

Unknown like a moth huddled between cloth,
that charcoal winter wool;
chewing through the weave...

to leave a mark-
to leave a mark-
to be a moth,
to be a moth-

To be a Mother;
To be a Mother...

My tongue leaned on my throat,
saliva smothered the gate. Water
took up most of my body,

and then the heart-
And then the part of the heart-
that learns laughter before
language,

a child.

You weren’t even you,
you is a word I carried
You, who might have learned laughter before language
holding me, growing me

I read somewhere,
“Flowers are how plants laugh”,

But I hadn’t known a seed had sprout-
I waited sick and your petals grew,

You never learned me,
But I learned you.

Unskinned,

Have you ever itched
a scratch so hard, the cap
of your knee began to bleed?

Have you ever needed to see blood,
to recognize - it’s still there?

It’s still there.
I’m still here.

The skin is the only organ,
holding us in- always ready
to erupt;

Sometimes after a cut,
my heart falls out easy like a penny-

the world enclosing it,
becomes so uncontrollably Red.

Redness leaking to be looted,

easy like a penny,
so easy like a penny