My Lover’s Muse and 5 other poems

Their skins have never touched.
This I know.
But on his lips, I taste honey
of a dark forest’s blossoms.
She blinks in and out of his eyes
like a secret, like a distant moon
pulling restless tides of him
beneath his smiling face.

Some nights his mouth
on my pale throat
remakes my skin
in her caramel hue.

From our bed, I watch him
churn the ocean of his soul
with ink and lines and syllables.

She rises from his pages,
like a witch,
like a curse,
like luminous ruin—
and I cannot tell
their shadows apart.

I am cheekbones lit in his eyes,
dappled dark hair descending
towards soft dip of my breasts.
In the telescope of his gaze,
I am resurrected—
a radiant star on desire’s firmament.

He blinks, he tires, his gaze
pans past me—
an inevitability,
my quiet death.

What keeps me up at night
is the horror of my blindness,
the perfected art—
rendering myself
invisible to myself.

In the long bend of the horizon
if no one watches it blaze the sky,
does a comet forget its own existence?

Wrenched from sleep
in sweat-stained sheets,
hair unspooling a mess
of ribboned dreams—

how cliché to write
of restless nights,
heart suspended
in the widening now
like a timepiece
taken apart–

a pageant of strange
silver selves
haunting corridors
of your body—
and you speaking back
in the satin and blood
of poetry.

After Amal Al Sahlawi

Do not ask me to wash
my skin of this dust, this gold,
this blood-laced soil—

Home is where the mango tree
remembers the laughter of پرناني
where kisses she bestowed
on her many ٻارن
rest as fragrant prayers in the walls.

I would live in these rags forever,
the scents of سِنڌ‎ haunting me.
I would inscribe the names
of corpses I’ve seen
in silver sigils on my tongue.

I will look up,
searching for محبوب ستارو
above this unfamiliar land,
pale and insipid,
a caricature of home.

～

پرناني – parnaani – great-grandmother
ٻارن – baaran – children
سِنڌ‎ – Sindh
محبوب ستارو – mahbub sitaro – beloved stars

Say “home”—
but never name
the village of your birth,
ancestors purged
from its silent orchards.

Say “once”—
but not that evening
you watched your house burn,
a carnival of flames
ravaging rice, Rilke,
ruby toe-rings
bought for your wedding.

Say “was”—
but not how it really was,
fleeing in female form,
soft curves a treachery
in trains and boats.

Say “joy”—
but not the aangan
where your first crush
traced your jawline
with a rose.

Say “death”—
but do not name
corpses you abandoned
on your way
to the promised land.

Say “never” “never” “never”
when you dream of return,
for India is free*, a new era
beckons—

You, sorceress,
exorcise geography,
rebuild your rubble.

～

*The tragedy of India’s gruesome partition arrived hand-in-hand with the victory of India’s freedom from colonisation in August 1947.

aangan: courtyard

After Ghulam Farid

Everything is airborne
in this strange city
whose dead ends
and crossroads
fall through the sieve
of my mind.

In the tamarind tree,
swallowtails tumble dizzily
like petals of peonies,
parakeet couples
flash emerald axillar
in a grand swooping.

I remember soft jade hills
rising from the river’s banks,
an egret chasing its mate,
east to west, white wings whirling.

My beloved lives in that land long lost
to blood and ink and mazhab.

Who will turn my aching skin to feathers?

～
mazhab: religion