ratmaze
the moon is still balsamic beneath the skirt-seams of blue lilies. here we are made beautiful by invisible hands . his sweat shines to coal oil. in his tailbone, the dawn is all smoke & lumber. he bends /picks up a cow-skull - five decades of the riverbank kneading the yellow tissue of its shattered jaw. i smile : terminology as sentiment. we run the lab and watch for the faintest mottling in the paroxysms, a reduced frequency to shatter us out of our collective static. the erratic glass puzzled with my rigored calculations. on a steady diet of cigars and cognitive neuroscience. between ethos and eros, one slipped consonant. here i can think towards a comforting emptiness, the sea rearranging itself to whatever chronic animal it imagines itself to be. mornings are always so geometric in their departure, he or i conclude. barest light : ensampled, triangulated, insectual, the leash of a perpetually halted wave. intimate displacements. my finger is a thimble for some kind of paused sensation. at this exact moment, the page references 3 solid paragraphs on "refraining”. mimesis v/s osmosis. you are asking me about the politics of neurons, tiny missives trickling down this compulsory flux. i am thinking of the brain and its million blazing archives - its imperfect previousness. the profusion of a room exists within me as much as i inside of it. & here the silence always undercuts me with its sharpest flowers.
psalm
my mother hassles the newspaper out from the postal slot, eyes narrowed into the glasses - “some more people died somewhere. from the window the sea is plumed in an aurora of fishing nets. a sky stretching its deep cut through the water, a vein cauterized, versed carmine - a single lyric in arabic. a page folding into its own ebb. at the threshold of a failure where a word becomes a war, cells shivering shrapnel, a leg turning into ax handle, a mouth more wired than a suicide bomber. this here is where the body becomes a theorem for aftershocks.
x
this heat is genealogical. this house reincarnated into a praying mantis. its windows fall off as wings from lightning bugs. its skin of clay and tin. its muscle of hustled slate. its dreams no longer typed with an epistolary sangfroid. no longer the dusk with its vulpine rudiment. no longer the somnolence of sense. the headline practices its elegy - a girl was gutted behind a bus-stop.
x
between her thighs : moss & blood. between her thighs, so many worlds profaned into a headless howl. my name is not red but my tongue is weaponized iron. if the girl was hexed back to breath, she’d alliterate - bullets, breasts borderlands - she would tell you about women whose christ-kissed skulls are buried in memory's quicksand. her earth hands will not feeble themselves into lavender stems. she will not wash the soot from her feet or your white marble temples. she will dance with her dirty feet, dust-wind percussing in shiva’s skull-drummed thunder.
x
who said naked was analogous to embarrassment? who said what was once left was always unwanted? she will sit inside a snakepit. she will learn when to shelter, how to shed. they will spot her some night - black opal glistening in the milkweed. the sea coming back to claim every animal we should have left unnamed.
x
this heat is genealogical. this house reincarnated into a praying mantis. its windows fall off as wings from lightning bugs. its skin of clay and tin. its muscle of hustled slate. its dreams no longer typed with an epistolary sangfroid. no longer the dusk with its vulpine rudiment. no longer the somnolence of sense. the headline practices its elegy - a girl was gutted behind a bus-stop.
x
between her thighs : moss & blood. between her thighs, so many worlds profaned into a headless howl. my name is not red but my tongue is weaponized iron. if the girl was hexed back to breath, she’d alliterate - bullets, breasts borderlands - she would tell you about women whose christ-kissed skulls are buried in memory's quicksand. her earth hands will not feeble themselves into lavender stems. she will not wash the soot from her feet or your white marble temples. she will dance with her dirty feet, dust-wind percussing in shiva’s skull-drummed thunder.
x
who said naked was analogous to embarrassment? who said what was once left was always unwanted? she will sit inside a snakepit. she will learn when to shelter, how to shed. they will spot her some night - black opal glistening in the milkweed. the sea coming back to claim every animal we should have left unnamed.
Bastar
“Whoever speaks up is silenced”
eventually, the women came home with terra cotta boats
& strawbaskets full of pigeon feathers & vespertine.
it was the eve of the flood.
their kettles hushed a seethe – dappled copper’s breath
-lessness against the wind’s octave. what was this country
an aubade of flint – cities of tumulus, an atlas of ant farms?
their children were long seeded deep as if unborn diamonds
beneath the soot -silt of coal mines. each rib of the staircase
cradled glass bottles pregnant with cheap napalm.
each hut stayed hazed
in the vanitas of kitchen-smoke - a verisimilitude
of morphine, mouths lulled by sacred evanescence.
they knew about the physics of drowning, their bones dilating
into sheaves of ingot. they knew about the appetite of water;
its untamed sequence of swallowing the very last
morsel of light. at midnight, their fires were fed on lullabies
as jhumkas glinted like jeweled poltergeists. under their hands, bread
as malleable as skin; their breath, a folksong
slowly amputating the voice of every river.
& strawbaskets full of pigeon feathers & vespertine.
it was the eve of the flood.
their kettles hushed a seethe – dappled copper’s breath
-lessness against the wind’s octave. what was this country
an aubade of flint – cities of tumulus, an atlas of ant farms?
their children were long seeded deep as if unborn diamonds
beneath the soot -silt of coal mines. each rib of the staircase
cradled glass bottles pregnant with cheap napalm.
each hut stayed hazed
in the vanitas of kitchen-smoke - a verisimilitude
of morphine, mouths lulled by sacred evanescence.
they knew about the physics of drowning, their bones dilating
into sheaves of ingot. they knew about the appetite of water;
its untamed sequence of swallowing the very last
morsel of light. at midnight, their fires were fed on lullabies
as jhumkas glinted like jeweled poltergeists. under their hands, bread
as malleable as skin; their breath, a folksong
slowly amputating the voice of every river.
Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo-Rroma social scientist, community catalyst, tea-sipper and hack scribbler of two poetry collections – Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2015) and one poetry pamphlet – to dhikr, i (Pyramid Editions, Forthcoming in 2017). She is the creator and curator of a cross-cultural, global dialogue space The Mira Collectivethat raises voices, awareness and funds to fight gendered violence and street harassment. She can be found squeeing about militant bunnies at zaharaesque or @zaharaesque on twitter/facebook/instagram
