Momina Mela

And as to the poets — it is those straying in Evil that follow them: Do you not see that they wander about bewildered in every valley? And that they say what they practice not? — Qur’an 26:224–226 The man I confused Allah for speaks into the microphone while the angels on my shoulders chew a mouthful of my hair. I wake up to a severed goat head and look at it hard enough to remember the animal in its entirety, a functional thing. The Saudis have built skyscrapers taller than the mountains in Makkah. This is a sign of the apocalypse; we worry with our backs to each other and look for Isa in the faces of men who appear to spin gold straight from the guttural source. 
I repeat the word mustaqbil like a new prayer; when the dog barks at a brick wall mustaqbil, when anemones collapse back into gothic buds mustaqbil, when I wet my arms to my elbows in the sink mustaqbil. All while Israfil kicks his feet against a stone wall and cleans his trumpet with each utterance. In the village, three men dragged a boy into our orchards and beat him to a pulp. The woman who eloped was strangled and thrown into the river. Pickpockets robbed the mourners at my uncle’s funeral —mustaqbil mustaqbil mustaq— my throat is infected by the thick-tongued promise; each night diluted into its prior belly. I use language to build the gardens I’m destined to be expelled from, each imagined rose rendered true.