Self-Portrait as a Lost Language
BY ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED
We name our bodies / anything that means to gather / flock
& clique
into belonging / into the tamarack wood / into the mouths
of January
the month I buy a bag of sweet / seedless / plum tamarind
& leave
the fruit to rust / we stumble into our blood / wild animals
yoking together
an inheritance / this country of unrest / where loss is shade
beneath
every cracked tree / a frisson of terror / each time lightning
embosses
the fields / the circumpolar boreal / & commodious prairie
rippling
smaller on my tongue / we name our bodies / before they
are unnamed
by the grassland smoke / & the feckless eyes / of those who
mark us
with an x / this winter country / its season of amaranthine
oranges
& tender mangoes / I eat the pith & boil the rinds / I hope
the ghosts
of first languages / transpire in the vapour / I am drawn to
every scattering
syllable / stammerings of Kutchi / & coifs of clove to split
the sweet
of this memory / this version / an imagined Dar es Salaam
in a story
passed down / we collect the fragments / gather together
blanks
& birch / judge our own belonging / this dream is a basin
of other
dreams / longing slips through like words / my tongue is
a sieve.
