Back to Issue Fifty-Eight

THE GNOSIS IN DIAGNOSIS

by TARFIA FAIZULLAH

My friend is scared she has less time now,
i.e. can do fewer vices now,
so of course tonight I do them all, but no
joy is involved. I know
there’s not much I can do. No news
is good news, they say, implying the news
is best as silence, preferable, I guess, to noise,
which autocorrect just changed to “noose,”
but asphyxiation isn’t what I’m into. The next
line of this poem should contain a nest
for my friend and I to soften in. I’m needy
for her and it feels selfish. The word need
traces its origins to the German “not,”
i.e. danger. Her life isn’t mine, but it’s not not.

ALIEN OF EXTRAORDINARY DISABILITY

by TARFIA FAIZULLAH

A spider came to rest
upon my shoulder. No—
it was there, all at once.
It—I shall call It “She.”
There’s a spider on me,
I said, quietly at first.
Then, there’s a spider on me!
I shrieked & shook She off.

Where there had been a shoulder,
a spider. I’d had surgery
on that shoulder. What was bone,
now metal. Severely deformed,
the surgeon’s note said several times
over. Severely deformed. Beautiful,
She was. Where has my spider gone?
I now wondered. I looked for She
in my orange sweater, a helix of gnats,
the blue side of a house,

its blue shadow. There is no home,
I’d been concluding, but not
sadly. The same old music plays on;
the scene is what it’s been, but now,
without She: daunting, repulsive,
delicate. It was I who crushed She,
unaccustomed to such eyeless &
intimate proximity. You wish to know
if I ever found She. No. She is no
more. And nothing. Nothing
can replace what is lost.

author pic here

Tarfia Faizullah is a Literary Award winner…

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