Fatimah Asghar

The dirge, our hearts, pounds vicious, as we prepare

the white linen, ready to wrap our bodies.

your father was fluent in four languages. you’re illiterate in the tongues of your father

Allah, you gave us a language

where yesterday & tomorrow

are the same word. Kal.

A spell cast with the entire

mouth. Back of the throat

to teeth. Tomorrow means I might

have her forever. Yesterday means

I say goodbye, again.

I build safety inside you

& wake in cuffs.

I’m all mouth. every morning

I whisper my country my country my country

& my hands stay empty.

what is land but land? a camp

but a camp? sanctuary

but another grave? I am an architect.

I permission everything

into something new.

I build & build

& someone takes it away.

he’s not my president but I live

in a country whose sun is war

we keep rotating around its warmth

our faces, sun-kissed, each & every morning.

What’s a nation to the sky? Some other wood

to call ours, some other snippet of cloud to pretend we own.

They aren’t soldiers. Just men. Men who wear matching shirts.

Men who carry machetes. Men who march in formation.

These aren’t refugees, just families vacationing to the Promised Land.

We aren’t at war. Just neighbors who like to kill each other

I think I believe in freedom I just don’t know where it is.

I think I believe in home, I just don’t know where to look.

We read the Surah about not painting

your nails or altering any part of your body

& wondered about our sheared bushes,

once a part of us & now finding shelter

in some smelly garbage. Maybe we misunderstood

the Surah. Maybe we were outside Allah’s creations.

But we knew better than to question my Auntie’s law.

We speculated the Qur’an hadn’t ever imagined

hairiness like ours, so vast, it was its own sin.