Disbound
I’m awakened to an atrocious dream: my sister cuts
her hand an extreme amount of mist
I can’t make out
the image
the scene has taken place
in the kitchen and as she walks into the living
the innocence of her one question hangs
What do you think?
per the word of mouth
the solicitudes and the dis
-figured candidate proceeds
At any rate, secure that delicate passage
Uneased, she asks if she could dhl this to my house
where I sit on my bed
examining my past and future
Two weeks following the dream
a last province falls
a coward
president
renounces the country
midair
the dream
follows the fall of a last
province
mid-week flees
a coward
two fellows renounce their bodies
mid dream
for a delicate passage
precedes the scene
of fall
extreme mist
an imagine
I examine
amounts
to
nothing
This June in the Bronx with my partner and his oldest friend
we watched one episode of exterminate all the brutes
soon
The documents affixed themselves to the members of my family
haunting me in ways unbeknownst to my lover or the old friend
Why do my people submit to this treatment?
terror jackets
spit motherfucker
air-striked
curse
blood
sewage
I am
that lucky bird
Frying Pan Park
The foundation two years before the takeover registers
that four in ten would leave given the opportunity
by opportunity
many, possibly, mean a dignified manner of conveyance
dignity, an intriguing practice
to be off tarmac a given dignity a
singular opportunity
for those whose command of a foreign language is found to be useful
to write requisition after requisition
claims such as “my so and so” “deserve” a) and b) also c)
hereby I promise not causing you an injury
and for those whose eyes must behold heart-wrenching capture
plane after plane taking off
the burial ground of locals
leaving behind most
concurrent misfortune
To inhale parallel particles in the air
my firstborn brother
—whose healing depression surges
across the heart’s bottom—
abandons Bamiyan
adieu indigeneity!
our second sibling
—whose eyes have taken on
the task of his tongue—
renders fear and welfare
welcome like a shrine!
our third a sportsman
—whose information includes
not being on an evacuation list—
cornered in a crescent kick, he drives
from a few neighborhoods east
to arrive in an apartment where the sisters live
where in a daydream I have painted myself
with an elongated arm stretching across
the continents to reach Venus’s hand
I create this tenderness to call them
with spiritual prerequisites
I barely hear
any fully formed thought
a babble, vanquished
sometimes a child’s cry
I try not to ask
what now and then
That intangible item, in and out of focus, hope like a sign of change
that everyone talks about, lives underground. It’s not uncommon
for it to persist or have little resistance to a flow of despair.
I try to grasp—is it a possibility to bring them:
My patient question ciphers irregularly.
Like neutrality amassing only to blow up in anger.
Despite the predictable tendencies, I’m sorry.
For up until the last flight, I was worried about my persons.
The plural scattered and in silence chanted god the greatest in support of an army
whose bodies were left in four hundred beds the nemesis press releases
cannot differentiate the dead’s roots from its belongings
It’s almost November
Two and half months of two-point-o
My husband whom I married in that invasive
August mentions in passing:
I didn’t expect us to suffer this much
this early into our marriage
The world’s wildest ideological practices
on that infamous
site
of
experimentation
I rehearse the sum of all interferences
and my own insignificance:
my forms oppose irresponsible innovations
as a colleague describes they self-emerge and self-suffice
Bare
and humbled by the bombardments
with no expectation of idiosyncratic
declarations
this poem:
fourteen hundred words plant the pledge
re-do, re-do
And even though I have stranded
many architectures of you
always there lingers an outline
of something I must get back to
When my father died
the constables were not poets
a cruel variant was traveling through the houses
—we had no procession of mourners
the killer banned all trends of grieving—
Outside, maps of the opponents were advancing
his gravestone on the long list of
soon-to-be-carved
if I ever go back
I will find him
lying next to my mother
nameless, at last
I want to go back
my father has died
their poets have traveled
to the outer maps
their killers have banned
all trends of advancing
constables’ cruel variant
fled from the country
a coward
carved a gravestone
for each house
to grieve a long list
of mourners
who had no procession
First published in Disbound, University of Iowa Press (2022). Used with permission. All rights reserved.