Dissection
The morning light envelopes
my skin like a light layer
of butter spreading over
the buttermilk
my mother churned.
Who am I?
A body full of wounds.
Lesions under my skin, like
half erased tattoos.
Poetry, a tourniquet
of the highest order.
My breath, salty
Embalmed with syllables
Sweat under my nails.
Feet smelling of urges
and urgencies.
Who am I?
Half a woman. Half a child.
The womb weeping a dream.
This existence, an effacement.
An erasure.
Who am I, if not these eyes, these lips,
this neck, these wrists?
Or perhaps this heart.
Or this brain.
Pick it up, anything you like.
It's an exhibition.
Love what you can.
To Write
To write, she tells me
and to write brilliantly,
It is absolutely necessary
that you live a little.
So I get a knife and
dig a grave of all the
deaths that I lived.
Hoping to find the sign
of a life, whimpering
under the rubble.
Visible traces of all the
laughs dismembered at
the funeral. Like the
ending of a song
echoing in your dream.
A child, a teenager, a woman.
One funeral,
And a child again.
Bodies pile up.
Half dead, on the brink
of a breath.
I pull them up and breathe
into their mouths.
Tugging hard at the hem
of a life.
A whistle escapes through
their nostrils.
I step away, and find it gone
I lean in and find
a song.
To write, I tell her
And to write brilliantly
It is absolutely necessary
That you die a little.
Birthing
A wail whimpers inside me,
and floats above my chest.
Holds my
throat with its bony fingers and
rattles me through the spine. Nails
dig deep into my collarbones.
Salmon skins for sun / Ballads
for rain / Elegy under the nails-
I bite them short until my skin bleeds / calling for a saviour.
Indifference
screams into my throat.
And I lie down.
The only answer I have / the only
solution I can offer.
My eyelids close, and I laugh.
Turned heads / pursed lips / bent
knuckles.
The only words I hear-
Pray,
To live / To not die / To not kill.
We sin, to pray that we shall not
We sin, to scream that we should not
We sin, to wail that we would not
A magician / An evil eye.
A theatrical affair / a stage show.
A wail whimpers inside me,
floats above my chest,
breathes its last.
And I call it a birthing
of the highest order.
Abandoned Alliterations
She sells
seashells,
On the seashore.
Stupid little girl.
Ludicrous woman.
It is she, your incarnation.
She, who sells dreams
at night.
An alliteration abandoned
at birth.
You distill the symbolism
on purpose / out of habit.
Clean slates and
burning edges.
The metaphor sits on a
rooftop and smears.
It laughs and its stomach
aches.
Cheeks hurt,
and tremble.
She kisses them and her
mouth bleeds.
Her body,
now an offering.
She sells her death.
Her life,
your Magnum Opus.
Sleep, on the ridge
of your eye.
Your eye, a burning
gold watch.
Tick-tock, Tick-tock
Pay a price,
Buy a dream.
She lays on the shore.
Her back embalmed in water.
Sand tourniquets
lapping hope in a haste.
A funeral,
A rehearsal,
A metaphor.
She sells
seashells,
On the seashore.
Deceptions Through Midnight
You left your hurt
with me and I named
it my own.
The curtains now ruffle beside
my earlobes
Tingling them in a burdened
mischief
Midnight looming over
a city on the threshold
of a half-lived evening.
The air, heavy with the
pungent smell of swallowed
anxieties.
Tell me, how do I help
you by disappearing?
You say the things we hate
now are the things we
couldn’t love properly before.
Like old men.
And children who are
products of war.
So you run away, and
in my home, the
bedsheet twirls into
a perfect moon.
A half lived presence still
lingers along my bedroom walls.
Tell me, how do you help
me by reappearing?
You left your hurt
with me and I held it in my heart
longer than anything else
My chest now breathes
a strange fear.
An unfamiliar scream grips
my throat.
You left your hurt
with me and I named
it my own.
Now I carry a weight
I don’t even recognize
These poems were part of The Poetry Issue 2023, curated by Shireen Quadri. © The Punch Magazine. No part of these should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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