stilted words
stillborn
slide out
from torn
slash flesh
blood red
lipstick mouth
spews out
bloodless ugly triplets
‘I / love / you’
I choose ‘I’
not love
not you
not seeing eye to eye
but
fighting tooth for tooth
forebears cry out
they see
everything
from top
of swaying
family tree
daant ke lie daant
don’t lie Continue reading “Hir Qing Sorrow by Iain Fraser”
I WILL SURVIVE
Where I come from, they still bury girls alive. Yet my father went and gave methai, sweet fat-fattening nourishment, to everyone he knew when he found out his first born was a girl. Then came the reality of teaching his girl how to make it as a female in a culture where older men, sometimes even in one’s own family, grab-a-feel of a prepubescent girl if they so choose. The easiest remedy was to turn me into a boy. I can’t recall if my wearing shorts, no make-up, very short hair came from a desire to be like one of the boys or to survive. I learned to curse very young and I trusted no one for a very long time. I learned to be the sun that can rot you from my father; I learned to be a woman who knows the man in the moon from my mother.
Continue reading “Exile is a Fire No One Can Put Out by Annie Q. Syed”
Rewinds
Peel open and peek:
inside the flapping, lolling mouth
of our mother’s photo album.
laminated with a sticky-wash skin
in grainy, colour-locked glamours.
encircled as we are, backlit and gypsy-like,
upon the retina of her old kodak.
Leaf through and look:
at our mother’s postgrad bungalow,
and the cats she found and raised alone.
and here, in burnout red, our ex-brothers,
with their lucid, low alley guitars.
and these polaroids of nameless children,
in some backyard mummery we long forgot.
Browse, then burrow:
deep into this picture house novel,
framed by weddings. birthdays. sleepovers.
reunions. divorces. second-hand toyotas.
painted kitchens. political borders. the first dog we ever got.
Then her final photo. Book ends.
Snap shut.
The film roll clicks.
And our lives rewind again.
Dementia
come to mind cloud
come to cloud mind – Marie Ponsot
& every now
& then,
i sit by her feet, on her porch
never ever talking.
& together,
we watch the soughing
heavens mutter, str-
etching their
cotton-silvers
in lulls & retorts
of
nearly went & nearly wait
– crossed & crossed all over.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 