BY AYESHA RAEES
Rope into string
On air. Breath held. Brown body in stamp. Tunes overhead. Breaking news. Flash reds. A stream of consciousness has become fleeting. I am burdened in consumption. Charts include third world lives as happy lives. Who paints ignorance as ignorance and good as good? Asking for a dead friend. A shadow is a being shifting with the sun. The tide is a being shifting with the moon. In the middle, I am being shared. There is a little Ayesha on a swing asking older Ayesha for a noose and older Ayesha is breaking rope into string. In my own space, I perform towards a better Ayesha. A fixed Ayesha. A corrected Ayesha. I am looking for my mother I am looking for the rest of the earth from which my muslim body was clayed. Who shares my soil? Who exists with the same waterings? Which Ayesha do I worth? Which do I blame? Nevermind. Let’s move on. I want to talk about ether. Once I woke up to it and felt every weight drop. Rib lift. Eye dilute. Passage way. When the MTA stops my train in the tunnel for an hour, shuts off the light and air, I shake it out. My heart becomes a blue sky with whisky white clouds. My skin rains. Don’t go. I say. Sun. Share some. When I wake, it’s the station, and there is a tired unpaid nurse pushing me out onto the platform. I want to give her a medal. I want to give her my life. Are you my mother? Above the tunnels, an Ayesha pats an Ayesha in shouldered sobs.
Bless
After Dawn Martin Lundy’s “Religion Song”
Setting: our ancestral surroundings. My children say, your fingers are our names.
Name us. Dented and limbering the body folds into cradle
inside the holed trunk. The gunshot consumed
by the horizons of our distance. The future a char.
A silhouette against a vanishing light.
War is a hand fighting the other for pulse until the throat
flows the tongue with a religion song.
Outside the train, underneath the bled, my children have begun their day.
Ayesha Raees identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Raees currently serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor at AAWW's The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers' Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Raees's first book of poetry, "Coining The Wishing Tower" won the Broken River Prize hosted by Platypus Press and judged by Kaveh Akbar, and will be forthcoming in March 2022. From Lahore, Pakistan, Raees is a graduate of Bennington College, and currently lives in New York City. Her website is: www.ayesharaees.com