Avleen | neither dead nor alive nor beloved

@mapoesie

A little child unearthing a chocolate coin from the ground, curious about the golden glint of the wrapper, legs stained with monsoon mud. Kneeling as though praying unknowingly to the earth. “Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.” — Margaret Atwood “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.” — Virginia Woolf Trying to be here, as much as I can.

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volume

the noise gets stuck like the chirp of the birds outside. a day happens, then an- other country closes shop. the ladies on the metro safe now, the stars all askew, but no good looking at the sky now. inter- national suits crimson ties. your tailored smile wrinkled, frayed online. so many want to live. so many deserve to breathe. i no longer can follow comfortable metricality. alone, i sing all alone. i sing alone i sing alone and wide like a drunkard opens arms i sing alone and deep like a little girl loves i sing alone and loud like the thunder of your silence speaks for your lightning solidarity.

#coronavirus #suspension #quarantine #poetry #poem #mine #solidarity

suspension

It will come like the changing of seasons, It is close like few weeks, few events are. All of us rationing. The long sleep Under the curve. It will not flatten if you do not breathe. So, close doors with ease. When it comes, the sunlight on our faces. The skies longer, unfazed by the loneliness we forgot would break us. The world will be lighter. Burying to do. Even my mouth, always worried of saying the wrong things feels lighter at the thought of your smiles. We will take a minute, when nothing blows over us, remember: the rent is due soon, the harshness of us unmelting, melting. We will walk out like naked things: maskless. Children-like at our ease reborn. The day you step havoc to business again, your face will be pink. You will think on your slow walk home It’s like this world never needed us. It will be business as usual.

#coronavirus #suspension #poetry #poem #mine

unearthing

Since we had not woken up when we had expected, since the days of trembling with joy that did not have to be taken nor earned, we sang like our voices came from elsewhere than our plexus and adamant, we wanted limbs like ours — to rest on, some solace in the end- less days, to kiss like our first loves had changed their mind for the better like our parents’ ashes were a fistful of pollen, and nothing more insidious than a rose grew inside your ribs, and they were leaving their rest places for us while inside we went, because our work was only the loving to do to see barren earth and to turn the roots up, like a sigh of tangled hair bunches eager to be held by some- thing bigger than itself.

#poems #poetry #poem #mine

lifeinpoetry

“But find me manic & you can’t find me. I’m a knobless door. I cook meals for the dead & they eat. I ride the casket like a car, step into traffic like a car but I’m a body. No body can look both ways simultaneously. Except me. I’m an eighteen-layer lust-cake.”

— Shira Erlichman, from “Perfect,” Odes to Lithium

Please write more often. You have readers :) xoxo, bless you!

I can’t tell how old this is, but I’ve been reading. Should I start posting again if anyone reads this blog?

apoetreflects

The earliest light we know

is out there on the hill this evening, calling to us. Starlight

is an ancient lilac, a talent for the fragile certainty:

there is a speck of memory. Then it is quiet.

It’s sacrilege to imagine

how someone should or should not have loved you, umpteenth time.

—Sarah Vap, “Reconcile,” from Faulkner’s Rosary (Saturnalia Books, 2010)

memoryslandscape-deactivated202

Hold him. An infant can’t love himself, I think. Plum, magenta reversals of light—a cloth ball to roll to the infant. His is the more decent dark radiance—he is still an infant picking through a pile of yarn. He might watch the beautiful things of this world disappear. Yet where my remembrance joins his reminiscence—as scraps of paper on the floor, or a few purple tiles. Who, on the advice of her soul alone, could be the counterweight of his plain light. But the final color is different as something permanent is. As an heir to memory is, or as a love that will hurt us.

Sarah Vap, from “Hold him, An infant can’t love himself, I think … ,” Viability (Penguin, 2016)

skyandblues

The place I come from is beautiful.

Sheesh Mahal, Pakistan.

ultimate-passport

Lotus Temple - Delhi, India

A holy place of worship for followers of the Bahá'í Faith, the Lotus Temple has won numerous architectural awards, making it one of the most recognisable buildings in India. Like all other Bahá'í places of worship, the temple is open to anyone of any religion. The “petals” of the lotus flower are made of pure marble imported from Greece.