Having Lived in the Light of the Black Sun

by Shazia Hafiz Ramji 

                                                                  I can say

            my home was sopping and mapless

in magnolias, our fluted mouths folded against

             the cold light. This story is no longer

available, says the app upon my lurking.

            Minor prophets shimmer and ache

in the endless frequency of simulacra. Here I am

            trying my hand again at artifice. I hope

you can see this flamingo of self-reflexivity

            stepping off the hospital bed and the methadone

to move windward into what we call the future

            with its publication schedules and sensitivity

readers working more than a year ahead. I have already

            been dead in some ways, you could say. But

the mistake I have made is to consider this living

            in waiting. Yearning to reach the finish line

of my family tree that disappears somewhere around

            1750 when we learned then how to glimpse

our world now, through cameras and telescopes.

            The spectacular craft of my father gave me a periscope

from milk cartons. I learned to live underground,

            my mirrors stinking of milk, peeking through the carpet

thick with bougainvillea and chicken feathers and plastic packets

            of alcohol flipped in the gardens by my grandfather.

They say the mark of melancholy is the loss of language. I remember

            his muteness and mine that followed, chosen through no will

of our own but ours nonetheless, a will like a bulbous roach

            scuttling under the gate that led to the prayer hall

a holy will, like all the women. Their desertion

            and defiance, the sun always stippling across

hijab and sari as if magic were a currency that asks

            the gulls to stitch their calls

into the shore for us so that time peels itself

            from the dark columns in the cities and

appears to us in the pink fingers of magnolias

            punctuating the supplicant air.

“Read,” the voices say. This poem cannot end

            but we will, someday

knowing full well that we have been called

            autistic and druggie and shy and mad

and we will know to wait for the promiscuous rain falling,

            touching everything.