When We Meet (Ghazal)
Which one of us will have crossed the sea when we meet?
Will you recognize who I will be when we meet?
I depart my body’s American borders.
Flying colors, but of no country, when we meet.
My siblings in Kansas state-made walking targets.
I may be unwheeled—synecdoche—when we meet.
Their bloodless tribe I claim in altering my blood.
Do not think I forsake ancestry when we meet.
Even as bathroom doors close, airport gates slide shut.
Who among you or I will be free when we meet?
“Call me Ishmael”—you Ismaili—strange paths converge—
Homebound to you and Shahid Ali when we meet.
In the end, I only wish to uphold your pride.
Could you accept multiplicity when we meet?
Called Sahar— dawn—I am always a beginning.
Nani, let me still call you Nani when we meet.
occupier artclass
window is cracked
open to let fresh air in. outside
sunny schoolyard under
lovely cloudless sky,
the kind of blue begging
to be licked and torn asunder
by hungry jets of orange
flame, filled with thick black
plane-crash plumes of
billowing smoke.
same way soft olive
infant skin cries out for
sumac blooms, for white
bone split by gleaming
steel-toed boots.
these shades belong
together, brighter
juxtaposed. says it
right there in the text
book. close instruction
rears our best. shining
chosen children
nursed with blood-laced
milk. whet the appetite
young and they will paint
in hues they know and
they will eat the world.
Shirin Abedinirad, Liminal, 2022. Land art, Tehran, Iran. Set within the open landscape, the work places a door at the threshold between worlds, inviting viewers to pause in the charged space between past and future, certainty and possibility, before stepping into the unknown. Artwork courtesy of featured artist Shirin Abedinirad.
