Fatima Jafar
Beach Avenue
We drove back to the water, wanted again
to hear the rush of purple waves as they rose and
erupted in the dark. The sand wore earrings of
cracked glass. With half-closed eyes, the stars
could be salt. A tulip: a mouth. A hand: a bird.
One wing, three. What luck—the night did not
distinguish between what was ugly or sublime.
Jilted moon pressed its face into the mud.
That night, I dreamt of whale tails playing across
the ceiling like notes from a windchime. I waded
through all the alphabets I knew, moved to put
a dream-kettle on a dream-stove. It hummed
the sound of a human voice. You sat beside me, your
body humming too, like combing sugar through
a sieve. The room filled with smoke and then you
were reaching, then you were touching my arm.
Fatima Jafar reads “Beach Avenue”
Self-Portrait as Bedroom Diptych
I.
Warm in the childhood cave of shimmer songs,
diaries with lock-and-key mouths, home of the tri-coloured
friendship bracelet, the gushing stills of infancy still slightly wet, still
lightly warm, virgin shells from beaches I didn’t know the names of yet.
Where I learnt words like lock and key, moonlight, jelly, amorphous
sound to sieve time into hard resin. Untouched here by my alien
shade of blue. Redness pulls and I struggle to think: sunlight, wooden
chair, child, that is all I remember. Now—
now, night’s knifed edge
II.
in the bedroom where a house centipede tunnels into an open
socket, where I contemplate killing a small life or not. Hearth
of decorative flourishes: drugstore candles that honey the air, a jade
bowl of rings, a pressed flower from a once-life. I, too, am burrowing
into crackle most of the time, hoarding sentences like wrapping paper,
sinew string, tending to my tender myths like a shepherd to his flock. Tremor
on the hard, hard exo-shell. I let memory’s alphabet strain through me like
a live wire, learning the word only by the char it leaves on the skin.
Fatima Jafar reads “Self-Portrait as Bedroom Diptych”
Fatima Jafar