Khaana-ba-dosh
Each hiccup is hindsight Breath tossed out
in spasms of trickled trout Did you imagine
your lungs meat-totes drooling tar Bombay
blasted from its loaded nightjar You inherit
a country just like an addiction shifting to your
veins before you could learn how to trench
your blood The gardened swarm red valerian
flecking sorceries of hoverflies My grandfather’s
shadow bent over some logic or ledger
in stony devotion Light engraving on his kurta
the tiny joys of ashoka buds When I say
contain do I mean to shelter or to shut in?
The books were auctioned off to a besotted
truss of votarists My mother brought back
the cushion covers embroidered by cattle-breeders
Never to use only to touch on certain damp evenings
when the air would explode in histrionics of a thousand
wings Little pieties of Light Emeralds To lose is
always a euphemism for being stranded or stilled
in the middle of a memory that will not concede
to any obedience of closure or continuities
Anatomy
I
When Q died, the debris refused
any further diagnosis. I am Afghan
only when rug or opium. What count
-ry can be smoked into a signal-fire?
Praise be to the kabuliwallah, baby
alligator skins shirting chubby melons,
grandmotherly lapis flirting with new
cleavage. A hundred years will root
in a bed of brave turnips planted to
salt away a porch-full of daughters.
Empire red on our tongues, the goat
profaned to loiter before buzkashi.
The blue wave of Her veil stammering in
the clutch of a deep gust like a tired flag.
Next to her, a boy the size of a birthday
candle. Shoeless feet, cognac-tinseled
eyes. De veritatibus primis, hymned the
lapidary. There must be peace in knowing
that you can cut life from the grey mood of
any stone. The day after the first drone, his
body emptied the final palate of its dreams
in a dugout of blood-complexioned rocks.
Everything that is possible demands to exist.
II
In General Theory of Victims, François Laruelle asks: “[W]ho deserves to arise, who is able to?”
Suppose this thing we won’t name is just the patient magic of nymphing for trouts—the angler lured in mid-tongue & the rest of its body leaving water like a ghazal of light.
Mine was a swift terror—a slippery amphibian in its practical spacing. Grew gills in the bathtub, flexed limbs in the bed. On some afternoons, it was a clique of wire-hangers asking to be unshaped, straightened into a quicker consequence.
In whichever tasteless city he threatened to abandon me throughout the trip, I often did find at least one animal of unashamed flaunting. Some thin leak of sulfur blurring the pelt of roads.
Propped against a harem of pillows, negotiating with the bone spur to pull back some of its flames from my spine, I burrow into a pdf about fibromyalgia. Differential diagnosis. Meaning your pain labours under a pseudonym. Meaning something is hunting you from within with a wolfpack of newly readied teeth.
Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, community catalyst, and a writer. She is the author of three books—Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband, (Salopress UK), & The Bluest Kali (Lithic Press, 2018). She is the creator and curator of The Mira Project, a global dialogue on women’s mental health, gendered violence, and street harassment. She is the founder and Chief Therapist at The Talking Compass—a therapeutic practice created to provide affordable mental health help for people. She can be found squeeing about militant bunnies at @zaharaesque on twitter/fb/IG and at her website.
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