Self-Portrait as a Girl Onscreen Watching Someone Masturbate to Her Offscreen
as he lifts me to his lips imparts a deciduous kiss
he tells me I’m real when I tell myself I’m not
the figurative divide opens up like the gap
between the wheel of a speeding car & the solid ground
the immediacy of collision and/or collapse a cautionary tale
about the dangers of recognising god —
as he throbs & calls me by a name I don’t understand
I dream of giant water lilies
why do I dream of giant water lilies?
awake, will I dream of giant water lilies birthing themselves
huddled in a sac of baked white liquid
they can’t possibly emerge from
as there’s no hand to pull them apart
no hand to caress like mothers
[they’ll know no other]
as they grow up ugly &
unintelligible as light against light?
as he unzips readying himself for the dizzying
emptiness
fata morgana
my dream ripples like the song of cicadas
but today it escapes him so he improvises
mumbles a slice of his childhood home
calls me mother mother mother mother —
I dream in primary colours
tell myself he can’t touch me
but I wake up to thumb prints on my skin
I realise we’re more alike
than I ever thought we could be
in our longing to be real for once
Reverse-Abecedarian in Which My Dead Father Re-Enters Earth’s Surface
zephyr caught in earth’s mouth—a
yearning broke out in the forgetful bedroom of
xeric tongues & salted limbs & dreams lost to
worm food. when abbu died, his body refused to decay. he
vowed to live a better life this time, to not be the
untouched period but a skin-warmed ampersand.
trusting his body as a passion, he began his
swansong quietly & re-entered earth in a
retrograde motion. he looked for my mother in the
quicksand of time & found her asleep in his
palms as a bruising foetus when he himself was
old as stone. he so wanted to come home & cry
no no no no. as she travelled to the nameless city of
moon & rhymes, his bones de-creaked with a new
liminality. & as he began to de-age, walk more, she finished
kissing dust, & danced with the freedom of a red-capped manakin.
just as they paralleled briefly, he in catching youth, & she
in catching age, just as he thought he would love
her finally, he turned invisible: a needlessly formless
glass when he longed to be her mirror & she went
farther down the road to let god hear her this time &
enter a love she could hold with no
difference between devoted & divine. what a
clusterfuck for abbu to end &
begin as the end itself.
at second chance, you’d think he’d get it right.
Ammara Younas
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