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Splitting Screens

A woman's silent dread, a hollow bone, struggles against a harsh world of male dominance.

March 14, 2019

Broken gram, her
weight and balance, beam, repeat
doesn’t miss a single beat


Woman as splitting
headache, bad apple, spittoon for seed,
bossed from on high, sifting


Through shifting feelings, fear
like a clot of flour in the cake
no one would know the measure


Of that furtive cupping, unread blood
would boil over, yet remain
hallways in the marrow, dread


Hollow as a bone to pick
and pick it up she did, knowing
those hated eyes that held


Her pittance hostage like a soft
summer peach biting
her lips to keep an angry dam


From spilling the beans
because par for the course
men were golfers, women holes.

‘Splitting Screens’ Originally published in the Summer/Fall 2018 double issue of Pratik

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PART OF A COLLECTION

Indelible in the Hippocampus is the Laughter and 2 other poems

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Sophia Naz

Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator. he has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry. Her work features in numerous literary journals, including Poetry International Rotterdam, The Adirondack Review, The Wire, Chicago Quarterly Review, Blaze Vox, Scroll, The Daily O, Cafe Dissensus, Guftugu, Pratik, Gallerie International, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Madras Courier, etc. Her Urdu/Hindi poetry appears in the anthology Raushniyan(2018). Her poetry collections are Peripheries (2015) Pointillism (2017) and Date Palms (2017). Naz is a regular contributor to Dawn, Poetry Editor and columnist at The Sunflower Collective, editor of the journal City, as well as the founder of rekhti.org, a site dedicated to contemporary Urdu poetry by women. Shehnaz, a biography on her mother's life is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in 2019. www.trancelucence.net.

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