Faizullah - Registers of illuminated villages: poems

Graywolf Press Copyright 2018 by Tarfia Faizullah The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law.

If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks. Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-800-6 Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-990-4 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 First Graywolf Printing, 2018 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938024 Cover design: Mary Austin Speaker Cover art: Shahzia Sikander, Pleasure Pillars , 2001.

Watercolor, dry pigment, vegetable color, tea and ink on hand-prepared wasli paper. The artist, courtesy of Sean Kelly, New York. for yall shobar jonno

I do not count the time. Nina Simone I have a register which lists 397 eliminated villages, Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. The work is called The Register of Eliminated Villages. Its a very decorative, pretty thing Kanan Makiya, Frontline Somewhere in this insomniac night my life is beginning without me.

In Northern Iraq, it is high noon, the sun there perched over fields shriven with lilies, the petals of orange poppies red with a light that a gauze of gray sparrows glides through over sheaves of bone too stubborn to burn, all that is left of those razed towns. A mother turns to a father in the cold room they share, offers her hands to his spine. I curl inside her, a silver bangle illuminated by candles flame. I curl beside you, lay my head close to the vellum of your smooth back and try again to sleep. Count to one thousand, you suggest. Three. Three.

As someone must count hacked date trees, hollowed hills paved into gardens, though the scholar on tonights Frontline only counted each town destroyed: three hundred ninety-seven of them. Who counts dolls, hand stitched, facedown in dirt? Count to four. Five. Six. Count cadaver, stone, belongings: pots, spun from red clay. Who will count the amputated hands of thieves? A mother presses a hand to me.

Inside her, I thrash, a stalk of wheat blistered by storm. Sleep comes, brief as it is bright. I startle awake, turn to you. The register, I know, is real, fat with the names of the dead, elegant strokes of sharp pencil etched into thick pages. A father presses an ear to a mothers belly. I am wide awake.

Count to seven. Eight. Nine. You murmur, turn to me. Someone must be counting hours spent weaving lace the color of moonlight for a girls dowry. But I dont have the right to count hours, girls, dowriesjust the skin thin pages of the good book I once cut a hollow into, condoms I stored there, cigarettes.

Count each minute I waited for them to fall asleep. Count nights I sat alone on the curb, held smoke inside my mouth, released whorls of it into the air. A father leaves a mother asleep on her side, the crocus of my fetus nestled inside. I draw over us the thin sheet. A father reaches for the Quran, thumbs through page after illuminated page, runs his finger beneath each line of verse, looks everywhere for the promise of my name.

(Selfish) to touch the swan-soft aperture between a sleeping babys shoulder blades, (common) like dirt-new graves, like the seams of stockings we skim our hands down the length of, searching for the memory of the first ancient feeling we ever had.

Its easy (hollow) to laugh in bed with a new lover at the same joke, and know energy always precedes matter, but heres craving anyway in my begging body, fat with powdered milk. Why angel before serpent, why plucked rib before desire? Here, I hold both ends of my spine. There, pickled mango spoons (greed) into a clay bowl for our pleasure. O, these daily rituals we believe we are owed. O, arrogant, tongue-slung, costume-replete closets of our lives in which we assume (time) will still be there, a bare lightbulb burning. Memory pours starfish into the sky for us to imagine, and still we burn.

O, tendons of our unbearable master plans. O, maa, maa, maa. If were going to use knives, then we should learn how to carve (flesh) by whittling our false gods from stone.

She says, Your English is great! How long have you been in our country? I say, Suck on a mango, bitch, since thats all you think I eat anyway. Mangoes are what margins like me know everything about, right? Doesnt a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isnt a mango a placeholder in a poem folded with burkas? But this one, the one Im going to slice and serve down her throat, is a mango that remembers jungles jagged with insects, the rivers darker thirst. This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds.

Why use a mango to beat her perplexed? Why not a coconut? Because this exotic fruit wont be cracked open to reveal whiteness to you. This mango isnt alien just because of its gold-green bloodline. I know Im worth waiting for. I want to be kneaded for ripeness. Mango: my own sunset-skinned heart waiting to be held and peeled, mango I suck open with teeth.

The white cross pales further still, nailed arms watchful as window-light furls over the backs of our knees, as lavender shadows cut off our little necks. The white cross pales further still, nailed arms watchful as window-light furls over the backs of our knees, as lavender shadows cut off our little necks.

I am an infidel in this classroom church. I kneel with the other, restless on the cracked leather kneeler. I crave these pillars of candle. My mouth is avid; it sings fidelis, fidelis. My maa is in her kitchen crooning black-and-white film songs that curl her hennaed fingers around the rolling pins heavy back and forth. My baba leans forward in his chair, the Quran open to the last page, the dark words blurring as his eyes close to reconcile again the shapla shaped epitaph on his fathers tombstone.