My Body is a Forest
BY ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED
2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
There is a face in the trees—
I lost a language
to the gap-toothed birch.
Even the pine has learned how to swoon
when the wind
deposits a secret.
A country is born knowing what it means
to waver.
A lost country is made by its daughters
and shame begins as a seed
that blossoms perennial
throughout generations.
Clove keeps the cha bitter— for every dark
cross
I apologise
because I could not read the recipe
written in my grandmother’s neat script.
I added cinnamon crushed anise mountain
slope
and too many quartered
Canadas—
once I watched a mule deer unfold her limbs
and vanish
among the haloed trees
fog uncoiling at her heels a ghost
inviting her
into its loosened borders.
In the blood of every migrant
there is a map pointing home this body
is an ode to the scattered landscapes
that have marbled my neck
with dark
hairs and sharp coarse
longings.
Ask me how I remember her—
Not a face but a movement
legs stotting into a slip of boreal green.
A swatch of colour
in the shape of a lost country.
A daughter which is to say an inherited
vanishing
through the slit of a dream.
My Inheritance is to Long for [ ]
BY ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED
2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
What knocks over the jar of cloves? Each flickering cross lands on the linoleum scatters like the word for [ ]. My body is the shape of [ ] behind the grassland smoke. I have my grandmother’s round face and her double moles across my forehead— if she is the ghost that unmakes this second-generation belonging hollowing my body into great-great-memory splintering an ancestry into a chasm then I am the ghost in family photographs a generation of crossings becoming and unbecoming the country I long to know its [ ] and whistling thorn. I leave the window gaping like a lily’s mouth and welcome the clatter of fallen lines. Her language slips and quivers between my teeth. [ ] is the morning that clots itself like bloodlines and the ache that unfurls at the precipice of the throat— an unopened dried flower bud an apology a woman’s country / language spilling into the room as if to quell this need for wholeness each branch the slender needle of a compass every corner an ode to my homeland.
There Are Parts of Myself I Have Watched Die
BY ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED
2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
As if it is a kind of strength to hold something down
and slit its throat.
I have died three times in this poem, already.
The truth is, there is a river after death and I see it move
toward me, frothing in its shape of lemon wedges.
I seek truth in the surfaces that glint beneath eyelids
carrying a heavy lash. I close my eyes
and pray a good prayer.
I would rather see the pleating river than the knives
my neighours hold.
I would not call it strength how a man can lace up another man
and hang him by his religion,
how a moon can call another moon “blood.”
Yes, I have died three times in this poem by your hand.
The river speaks in whistles and stones; it says that perhaps
I have always been a visitor.
It carries away its marrow and driftwood
and sometimes my body stripped of its bleating.
I wonder, did I swim on a current and cut through this border?
Did I knock over a jar
of thirty-three prayers into a kitchen of hanging moons?
Or perhaps, what the river really said
is that I can only stay a visitor for so long.
After all, I know how much one loses in translation.
With each death, I become ghostly, ghostlier—
a mistranslation
that slips through a heart chewing its prairie grains,
a heart bred on western winds,
a heart that is almost a noose.
I have killed myself three times in this poem, already,
but only a single face fades at a time.
The river taught me once about belonging
and I turned those lessons into a grave.
