Now, our eyes are a pack of dogs. Follow mine.
We know the scent of the blued kitchen light.
This isn’t love’s choreography, just pantomime.
So, take my immigrant hand through this orchard. Run it
through ever ripe red, so the elk bone and pit.
This, the knowledge that divides us from the dead.
Each nail is shaped like a stem. To hang your bloom.
To display in an interior hot, feral grass of day.
You sleep in the position of riding a bicycle. No room
in bed while the watch spirits want you in this dark.
Nowhere to go, but to converse until we turn blue.
Each horse’s moment into the chamber. The gravity of red
pulses in each ride of what composes the self.
Starlings are an invasive species. Unwanted skies,
so, the moon is what? Magnificent desolation.
After starlings, silverfish appear in the unwish of water.
Each waist pocket filled with animal bones carved as guns.
I’ve known three secret chords and a cloud.
I’m fanned in the soft fawn of your fingers. A deer
eats cemetery grass out of my hands. In this moment
if I lose my myself, if I wreck out of this wander, I’d go
into no street’s ungalloped danger because it would all be clear.
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Born to Pakistani-American immigrant artists, Jai Hamid Bashir was raised in the American West. Jai has been published in The American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Small Orange Press, Palette Poetry, The Margins, The Academy of American Poets, and others. An MFA student at Columbia University in the City of New York, she writes between Salt Lake City, Utah, Washington Heights and Lahore, Pakistan.