‘I want no flowers,
no epoch of union,
no dawn of disunion.’
Kajal Ahmad
You grew up surrounded
by absent men,
shadowy black & white,
in gold frames,
their smiles ghostly in the foreground.
On your skin, you traced this rupture
following the faint line,
running down the Meridian of your body—
a biological scar of disunion
of place and time.
It made you wonder,
which part of you belonged
to the oceans you’d travelled over,
which to the immovable mountains
your ancestors were from,
where tears flowed
heavily through legacies of weeping,
a briny Euphrates,
and although those memories are not your own,
still you imagine
the moon barely visible and
tulips sprouting after nowruz frost
on the land they called home.
Guluk naksa ~ a flower is soft.
