Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

In a seaside desert port that wasn’t yet a city our grandfather built a wide house and called it gulistan There were no roses there just the new government four children that would be seven and a porch where he stitched shoes and mixed paste for paper maché book bindings He counted buds and tended love birds built their cage and bedecked it in blue and green and red foil this and gota that a cage the cat got into in front of the open water tankard the children got into during this or that fatal game Loose with life while their father cycled home in starched and ironed whites polished porch stitched black leather shoes a narrow mustache we now associate with genocide What is reverence anyway who writes the reverence rules After our grandmother died he developed a taste for Western sweets Flintstones pushpops and cokes and nerds Of all the things he typed and the typing was profuse none changed the course of history Like the verses of the Qur’an rendered in @ signs which he used as a coiled pixel taxing the Smith-Corona Coronamatic with his gridded plan Let’s hate the names of things like this Before they changed the world with typewriters the Smith brothers manufactured firearms Cartridge and ribbon bullet and thermal transfer Syracuse and gulistan Verses laid out in rows of @ seven @s in a vertical row to make an alif @s like a fallen E to make a tashdeed He did the whole Qur’an this way At some point in paleography they discovered this sign filling in for the A of Amen or Ameen in a Bulgarian version of a fourteenth century Greek chronicle Why and for whom or does The Book short circuit this question A smaller selection I have is a better plot for dirt ministrations just sura 8 ayah 46 inna Allaha maaAa al sabireen Allah is with the patient ones laid out in vertical reflection its geometry a formal garden hemmed by squares of @ looking in four directions paths and hedges of invocation borders of apostrophe trees of hail and leaves of call I wonder did he think his helical pixels looked like roses I wonder did he count the buds in every verse