Disbound
I鈥檓 awakened to an atrocious dream: my sister cuts
her hand an extreme amount of mist
I can鈥檛 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 鈥渕y so and so鈥 鈥渄eserve鈥 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
鈥攚hose healing depression surges
across the heart鈥檚 bottom鈥
abandons Bamiyan
adieu indigeneity!
our second sibling
鈥攚hose eyes have taken on
the task of his tongue鈥
renders fear and welfare
welcome like a shrine!
our third a sportsman
鈥攚hose information includes
not being on an evacuation list鈥
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鈥檚 hand
I create this tenderness to call them
with spiritual prerequisites
I barely hear
any fully formed thought
a babble, vanquished
sometimes a child鈥檚 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鈥檚 not uncommon
for it to persist or have little resistance to a flow of despair.
I try to grasp鈥攊s 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鈥檓 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鈥檚 roots from its belongings
It鈥檚 almost November
Two and half months of two-point-o
My husband whom I married in that invasive
August mentions in passing:
I didn鈥檛 expect us to suffer this much
this early into our marriage
The world鈥檚 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
鈥攚e had no procession of mourners
the killer banned all trends of grieving鈥
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鈥 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.