naz
“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”
From the rim rises a great flag, stopped
proudly on the edge of some fertile ground.
Without wind, it will not wave. It hangs loose
as the skin of the woman jousting with gravity.
The weight of a fist at the door sounds thrice
before the gate lifts. The woman's breasts are
bell flowers, speckled and bowed downwards.
She was a diamond duster; born into a cluster
of wealth with faces like glittery facets of the
jewels her grandparents secreted from Earth.
Hiding is the equivalent of putting gemstones
in a bag and tossing them off a cliff. Hope
is lost too easily. Knock one arrives: the visitor
carries bags of fruit and has bad teeth. The
woman whistles once, and the visitor takes
the pomegranates and oranges and rolls
each into the room. She leans down to select
something red and tastes ants on her toes.
Emotions are like fog, misleading if you look
long into the fuzz. Knock two arrives as the
woman finishes splitting the seeds against
her gums. A child at the door with rope
braided thick and strong. A long silk shawl
covers the child’s thin shoulders and the
woman bids, what is? She serves the visitor
milk and the citrus fruits, squatting on the
floor. Beetles join as the woman fixes the
rope to lift a dark curtain to cover the
hole in the wall. Not a window. A wide gash
into the rock overlooking the grey city.
The woman pulls the rope and the cloth
moves across the hole. The child leaps with
a full mouth and runs out the door. Words
create and destroy worlds—some things are
better left unsaid. The woman taps her sorrows
into a tepid cup of ginger tea. She cannot see
the sun. It’s too smokey. The birds died and
with them, the morning chatter perished too.
Knock three breaks the woman’s feet to the
floor; she is sad about being born. She rises
again; cracks open the door. A small donkey
stands sideways with a striped blanket on
its back. A leather satchel to the side. The
woman slips her hands into the bag and pulls
out a hard, flat object wrapped in leather.
A mirror. The woman presents the donkey
water, strokes its hair and slaps it smartly on
its rump. You go! She sends the blue mule
away. It trots lopsided with crooked hooves.
Shattering the dry mud into the core, the
woman feels the center scuttle sideways.
She can’t stop it, so she braces herself in the
doorjamb and waits for the dazzle to subside.
Her home is caked with diamond dust.
Twilight. She pulls back the curtain to watch
the stars settle. The curtains wave in the
humid. The woman places the mirror on
the window’s ledge and looks at her Self.
Night fire is in her blood. The flag flutters
in its cell of ivory walls. She will flush the
boils from her nervous system as she sleeps.
In her dreams, the mirror presents a zephyr
so strong, it wipes the slate clear of debris;
star and stone.
Photo source.
