by Alizeh Sheikh ...................................................................................
years I have spent at this bus stop, gnawing
my concrete walls, for I fear that when I
get home I won’t be able to fold my
self in its embrace for I’ve spent too long
expanding myself to accommodate
you.
God motioned to break our fast with a date,
so there you settled, a pit at the pit
of my stomach, stripped of sweetness and flesh,
and I sensed your mass but did not feel you,
hard, dull, worn smooth by time, resting there was
you.
I convinced myself that I’d inhaled you,
that my heart throbbed, quivered, swelled for you,
but my life’s cadence surged abaft, leaving
entombed in soft panels your heavy essence
for I never lived for you, I stomached
you.
after a hundred years I beseech you
to exhume my amber, crystalline self
and rip apart my sweet, undulating
guts, and tumbling to the ground will be a
million polished stones; one of them is
you.
For God banished me to a bitter fate:
I am a vessel for those I did love,
I am a vessel for
you.