ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Hadiyyah Kuma is from Toronto, Ontario, studying Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is a freelance writer, occasional poet, and short-fiction writer. She is hopeful.
Poets Resist
Edited by Michael Carter
August 14, 2019
Edited by Michael Carter
August 14, 2019
Et cetera
I’m tired, like a desert, like an American city
The sky can turn so cruel this time of year, makes me wonder
If a country has no heart, why does it breathe so heavy?
When everything is red, I look to you and ask for an update,
a text, a subtweet, an email
I share it all because you ask me to
The little things are supposed to eat away at us,
ants, bees, headaches, papercuts, the times we have been called _______
But nothing is little, the world is big, and a bed is big, and the wound
is massive even when we are fast asleep
sometimes sleep is good, I like being exhausted so I don’t have to feel
another thing, and another, and another, and another, etc.
It is, etc.
In geology class I learned that calderas are depressions formed by implosion, and so is hate, and so is hurting
in my first email to you, we talked about earthquakes, dangerous sea levels, the oceans that conquer everything, rocks that writhe and warm and turn to magma,
I thought of those unaware people
Wishing they could stand by a lake but having hardened knees
and dried up _______ under their shoes
It is the email before you send me your fear and I say
The red Urdu graffiti makes me very emotional. Your other photos are beautiful, besides the red military warning which I'm sure is even more anxiety-inducing to you than it is to me. I love the yellow and white flowers coexisting so beautifully together. I hope you and your family are safe, etc.
In the last 9 hours three things have gone crimson
The first day of my period,
The cover of Toni Morrison’s Beloved on the news,
Kashmir’s suffering preserved in Twitter avatars,
Piles of red, pools of red, and one day this will all be ________, and it will
only be etc
The permanence rattles heavy, sharp, disengaged, so alive
Words almost don’t matter, words are almost stupid, words like “safe,” words like “pain”
You call this “stupid poetry” and now it is all I can think about
I feel pain for a country even though its people are not mine
for a country even though ________ is just my friend,
for a woman who’s books I left on my top shelf,
her name stares at me the way ghosts do
The internet holds its breath, seeing
There is a country, it is a heart, it is beating
Etc, etc, et cetera.
To my beloved, etc.
Red, I feel pain because pain is unstoppable,
feels like
lifelong sister, estranged mother
instead of
casual friend, esteemed author
To be loved, etc.
To be loved in times of red, in times of blue, black, sunsets
I feel pain when my uterus sheds, healthy
and I must be thankful despite everything else,
must be like the grass that comforts the yellow and white flowers,
like the way you translate the words for us, fight battles with softness
in spite of guilt, in spite of stains, books that still smell new
which are just missed opportunities to say _________ will be okay,
even tired, there are always ways to be thankful
and that is the hardest cruelty of all.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
