Birmingham, England – July 2021: My cousins and I ran Around the house Picking hiding spots. Why are you hiding? My grandfather asked Who are you hiding from? It’s a game We laughed as I Stuffed myself inside the bathroom Lights off, crouched behind the door. He nodded You can’t hide from God He nodded … Read More
On a small island off the southernmost tip of India, a statue of the poet known only as Tiruvalluvar stands staring out at the confluence of two seas and one ocean. The statue is 133 feet high, symbolic of the 133 chapters that make up the 2000-year-old Tirukkural, a meditation on ethics, government, and the … Read More
Love Letter to the Biryani at Wahid’s, or A Joyous Poem in the Center Sheets of stapled steel fashion a fast shelter for the city’s appetites. Hungry, hungered, & hungering, may all in one night in these dense tendrils be converged. From all its next-doors, more spills onto the ear than the eye can hold. … Read More
a conversation is two mouths made one by a knot of string, strung taut and fluoridated and hamstrung and tasting one singular voice. one mouth indentures of the other to concur with silence as an outturn pidgin emerges. its decreolization subverts the first’s imagery and dreams of deification. the sway of rasa is the theme … Read More
Granddaughter, When I was fourteen, I crossed fourteen rivers, walked to every village that fell under Big Mountain’s shadow, knocking on the door of every medicine woman that knew the mountain rock as her own altar—passing a message, trick of safety, ruse to rouge unmistakable into ordinariness. They hid their medicine in the rocks of … Read More
She arcs an aural eclipse. Last night, the ashes swallowed us whole; a stream of rajgold bangles parting the brahma ghat, throat full of pink salt, ghazals spilling over the ornate moon’s boheme venture. I, milky meteors, trace your eye-lined courtyards slowly, ever so slowly. To remember the dead orphan who once named djinns after … Read More
like bugleweed, my unshaven hair is sprawling into sajda after all these years, these legs i’m still hauling into sajda when i went down on you i accidentally muttered a prayer my back turned to stars still feels like i’m falling into sajda i’m sorry i keep entangling broken verses in your curls it’s just … Read More
i have tried to catalogue my own mutation as my body peels gradually away from the place i come from. i cannot recognize this shape anymore, each time i walk on a straight edge it feels like a border, any line becomes a carving of land. i can’t think about the blue of water without … Read More
