Tarfia Faizullah

Maybe it was my old friend Fascination who first let me know that Danger was right across the hall, or maybe it was the unrealized absence of pollen, or, was it the nearness, Danger, of your hair’s blatant softness, just toweled. Or, I wanted to stop thinking — and, I wanted to ask, Do you think God understands attraction? Surely, right? Or, I wanted you to notice my anger, which you might not characterize as dangerous, per se, but rather, fickle, a synonym for “mercurial.” Maybe that’s typical. Yup, there is a liquid sharpness in me I wouldn’t unlid except    ...    damn, Danger, there’s this certain way you draw out epiphany    ... You’re messy, Danger, baby, meaning untidy, confusing, monumental, great in size, and also, of or serving as a monument, which leads me to reconsider the dimensions of sandwiches, as well as apartheid, the aphid, and the scarab beetle. Danger, can you feel me tremble? But I am saying nothing, dear Danger, you don’t already know — you’re used to being pursued with rage, unwanted advice, riddles. That’s not me, respectfully — Joy is always waiting to cyclone you with nothing more than a matchbook, a long gaze, a warm bowl.

—Independence Day Celebration 2011, Dhaka i. In a courtyard, in these stacks of chairs before the empty stage—near are we Lord, near and graspable. Lord, accept these humble offerings: stacks of biscuits wrapped in cellophane, stacks of bone in glass: thighbone, spine. Stacks of white saucers, porcelain circles into which stacks of lip-worn cups slide neat. Jawbone, Lord. Galleries of laminated clippings declaring war. Hands unstack chairs into rows.The dead: they still go begging.

I saw then the white-eyed man leaning in to see if I was ready yet to go where he has been waiting to take me. I saw then the gnawing sounds my faith has been making and I saw too that the shape it sings in is the color of cast-iron mountains I drove so long to find I forgot I had been looking for them, for the you I once knew and the you that was born waiting for me to find you. I have been twisting and turning across these lifetimes where forgetting me is what you do so you don’t have to look at yourself. I saw that I would drown in a creek carved out of a field our incarnations forged the first path through to those mountains. I invited you to stroll with me there again for the first time, to pause and sprawl in the grass while I read to you the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting to hear. I read until you finally slept and all your jagged syntaxes softened into rest. You’re always driving so far from me towards the me I worry, without you, is eternity. I lay there, awake, keeping watch while you snored. I waited, as I always seem to, for you to wake up and come back to me.

For Hasna Henna and the Rohingya Lice? My aunt once drew a comb through my hair steady; she wouldn’t let what feeds on blood eat my inner tree. Where now is the word for such intimacy? I know it still, but all I see are jungles burnt of our rarest trees. My point is: it takes a while to say, “I am a fire hazard,” or, “a household of rare birds” is another way to say tree. I wrote one draft of this poem, then she died. Will I forget her name, Hasna Henna? Let’s smell a tree; night-blooming jasmine, o-so-heavenly! A sapling succeeds by flourishing from a tree’s seed. How else to perfume these needs we breathe? A sapling of course = a small and soft tree (i.e. baby tree). I grieve the rice she fed me off a palm leaf. Only now can I fully marvel: how finely formed is a tree! Someone I loved said to stop with the oceans in my poems — well, oceans + oceans + oceans! We drown so many trees. (Night blooming tree = baby tree = once and future tree.) Lately, all I think about are trees. Read this again to replace tree with refugee. Tarfia = joy in the margins + one who lies to protect trees.

—at Dubai International Airport and ending with a line by César Vallejo Because I must walk through the eye-shaped shadows cast by these curved gold leaves thick atop each constructed palm tree, past displays of silk scarves, lit silhouettes of blue-bottled perfume—because I grip, as though for the first time, a paper bag of french fries from McDonald's, and lick, from each fingertip, the fat and salt as I stand alone to the side of this moving walkway gliding me past dark- eyed men who do not look away when I stare squarely back—because standing in line to the restroom I want only to pluck from her black sweater this one shimmering blond hair clinging fast— because I must rest the Coke, cold in my hand, beside this toilet seat warmed by her thighs, her thighs, and hers. Here, at the narrow mouth of this long, humid corridor leading to the plane, I take my place among this damp, dark horde of men and women who look like me— because I look like them— because I am ashamed of their bodies that reek so unabashedly of body— because I can—because I am an American,a star

—at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka Let me break free of these lace-frail lilac fingers disrobing the black sky from the windows of this room, I sit helpless, waiting, silent—sister, because you drew from me the coil of red twine: loneliness— spooled inside— once, I wanted to say one true thing, as in, I want more in this