Dilruba Ahmed
Alpana
Sister, let’s get my story
straight: one hand stains
your shirts so the other
can place rice
on my child’s plate.
I either sweat here
or under a stranger’s
weight. So when you
boycott a storefront
you’ll need a louder
roar to scare off
our global predator–
let’s call him
Mr. Sweetmeat,
from the land of milk
and money, selling
garments stitched
by a woman
like me. This is no
alpana: lovely dust
arranged and
erased in a week.
This work means
my child and I eat.
Meet your new world
artisan. And before Boss-man
will declare, “Honey, let’s
get you a chair, fix these
doors, give you
breaks, and–
really–pay you
more,” he’ll shut
down and begin again on
the other side of town.
The cloth is cut. The needle
waits. Take the blood from our
thumbs to lace your suits
and skirts. Someone always hungers
to enter the broken gate.
Grace
My baby’s cry is a siren’s
wail washing over the city.
Where’s the silence
that sleep brings?
When I shower the phantom
cries grow faint, each peal
real or imagined
water-hushed under
the showerhead’s shush.
What’s the meaning of collapse?
My jaw ratchets when I bite.
Each tooth ground to a nub.
I think of food eaten whole,
the wild animal
I’ve become. And no one
numbers how many failures
are private, how many public.
Who will forgive me if I
act with anything
less than grace?
The body still functions.
He still extracts
what he needs–
my child at my breast:
fleshy, sated.
I churn water to milk,
straw into gold.
Weep, weep,
good little machine.
Carnival
We’d only begun to detect
the air was full of tricks
if a woman could,
in a man’s hands, disappear.
The boys who manned the carousel
punched each other’s arms
when we dropped
hot coins into their greased palms.
We took a whirl. We preened like
park birds, creatures who
feed from strangers’ fingertips.
We took a crack at the vanishing
act with the lunches
we packed–cucumbers, yoghurt.
We could stage
our own departures.
Weren’t our bodies
meant to be flat?
Those women onstage,
the wisps they became–
they infused our hair
with a form of belief.
Carolina jasmine
choked the breeze
while magicians produced
rabbits from hats, doves
where there’d been none.
Southeastern Ohio
In stuffy gyms that passed
for mosques, my sisters and I
parroted words without grace:
Allah hu akbar. Salaam
alaikum. Then the prayer-song broke
and we mimicked instead
lyrics thrumming from
somebody’s Walkman: I want
your sex. The station wagon crawled
from house to house where
driveways spilled
with brown kids, where a friend
flashed her thabees as though
casting a hex.
In another country,
we’d have fasted and feasted in a
month of sunset meals, wearing
gifts of new dresses. Instead,
I took salt in my mouth
with our neighbors, brothers
from Egypt who passed the ball
and dribbled and spit all month
on the court, avoiding
their own saliva.
“Alpana,” “Grace,” “Carnival,” and “Southeastern Ohio” were reprinted from Dhaka Dust with permission from Graywolf Press, copyright 2011.