Jai Hamid Bashir
Through wolf-sized shadows of the moon, I worry about the last wooled world where my heart is an open window and I’ve called in the gentle fever of thieves; they are all so generous. I don’t have to be anywhere these days. Moonlight, my old mother, in a streak of chalk comes through pines, to teach me still how to tally mortality. I run a brush through my graying hair as if tilling the moon. One, unblessed rest and another dance through the bluedark. Don’t pull just this over your eyes. The cry of a serpent who knows no alphabet, but in its mute claim is its championed syllables. A forked-road of tongue is an unwinded line hymning and on hymning into river. A muscle, with such ankles and wading, envisioning itself to be round. In the middle of a broken stone, is another world, breathing inside this one. Three moves away from a midnight sun, where I remember the word for a second paradise. I wake up from a dream where I only know the word Ma. Where I call her and reach every ancestor from reams of ice and light that gladesin every true line and above beds of kelp. Where you come to the lost road, where you take off your sheepskin coat. Where I arrive now like a predator.
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Born to Pakistani-American immigrant artists, Jai Hamid Bashir was raised in the American West. Jai has been published and has work forthcoming from The American Poetry Review, The American Literary Review, Small Orange Press, Palette Poetry, The Margins, Academy of American Poets, and others. An MFA student at Columbia University in the City of New York, she writes between Salt Lake City, Washington Heights, and Lahore. https://www.jaihamidbashir.com/