Poetry is not a bomb shelter. A bomb shelter is a bomb shelter. The coffin-depth of its mouth. Its walls standing witness to the kind of loss we have scrubbed clean from our othertonge. Those who have seen or been inside a bomb shelter will not find any romance in its gutted vernacular — the jagged alphabet of nailmarks stinging a brutal calligraphy on its dirtfloor. The Empire came for us when we were sleeping. Our brown bodies slowly tutored to go from a broom to a bomb. Every time depression threatens to throttle me, I think of my own body as a bunker — a dry, airtight space where grief feels so safe, it never wants to leave. As a brown woman in her early 30s widely & incorrectly classified as “South Asian”, I was advised to wear a fake wedding ring when applying for a US visa. I will never directly mention how my partner is American so the embassy doesn’t assume that I in my kali-gorgon, medusaesque slither will slip into the great whitegray of the Pacific Northwest hunting men for a green-card. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to slip a drone above Afghanistan, my once-grandmotherland. To silence a song of goatherds sleeping in a truck after a daughter’s wedding. No need for long queues at the embassy. No need to furbish income proofs to ascertain intent that you have ties to your broken country and will definitely return. Will not become a taxi-driver or a waiter or a cook or a gardener in that foreign numbness. A bomb shelter is the only bomb shelter there is. Someone tweets — Anger is fine but why do you have to block traffic when you protest? Protest — etymology, late Middle English (as a verb in the sense ‘make a solemn declaration’): from Old French protester, from Latin protestari, from pro- ‘forth, publicly’ + testari ‘assert’ (from testis ‘witness’). I am the fogged Empyrean, the invisible witness; I am a long line that was whittled, winnowed, widowed. Deleuze says violence inwarded in Law. Violence outwarded is War. I repeat — a bomb shelter is the only bomb shelter. Trust me, me & mine have tried and died on that bridge a thousand times. And found nothing beautiful or poetic about the taste of the cold iron cutting through that dull, dark blood.

Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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