wrong poison
Islamic tradition states that Ibrahim, by God’s instruction, left Hagar and Ismail in the desert and walked away. Desperately seeking water for her son, Hajar ran seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah. When she was unable to continue, she set down Ismail, who scraped the ground with his foot. Water suddenly sprang forth, and the Well of Zamzam was revealed.
I tell father, sleeping
the slumber from which
one never wakens, mother
is out there, frantic, roving
home to hospital,
babbling to some god,
as I lace your doze with the wrong
poisons.
She wanders back and forth
seven times, sweltering in her big black,
measled-with-rainbow-polka-dots
down parka.
Seeking a simple drink of water
for your little son,
She beseeches Allah, perfumed stranger,
for a break, while you snore,
a merlin manqué,
just like your father—snuffed
by Partition when you were
only four.
She has never
beseeched a thing. She bakes
the best dream bars.
She quits this waiting, this wish of
waking you, and sets down her babe
in hell cooked,
god crooked dust, and bawling from thirst,
little punk kicks a dune
with his tender toddler’s heel.
And from that place
gushes forth
fresh water, cold as a basement lake
she christens: Zamzam,
the only sounds her lips know to stop
the moment her numb tongue catches
and combusts.
Hissing it now.
To you. For her.
That it may be fetching thunder
kept sound within your final snore.
Somewhere between the miracles.
tributary
1.
Raking my fingers across the broken
lip of this winter riverbank,
toiling toward a burial.
Or: building a hole. This undertaking
done without spade or shovel,
only ten brittle nails working this
corpse land only animal power daring
to carve out what god larked up with his watercolor brush.
Altering the course of my creek, tunneling to hit a
more pure and deeper wellspring—I strike only this
artery of panic, nicked and now gushing.
2.
My path crisscrosses so rarely with you,
who are all rivers yourselves, days and beds
engraved by a mindless grindstone long ago. We who
would drop anchor for depth in our circuits and suture
with blue sequins bracelets of us-wounded promises,
whose gouged, unkind truths pulverized to crumbs what none
of us recognized in time. They were too cold to
hold long, and soon abandoned to jagging waves of
chaos masquerading as
lightning–at least to our speechless minds. I cut
my losses. You drag the lake. As if that
freed us of something.
3.
I saw creases fashion where stones happen
to plummet, french braids plaiting
the surface that suggest this whole thing,
despite all elegance and simplicity, is false:
a wisp of warm, curious speech spilt
from an undertow’s throat means
not tonight.
Brave lime salamander–
for whose midnight plea shipwrecks
such as me would plunge in the numbing
current, would drown in freshwater streaming
black as dreamless slumber to more clearly cup
–your cry is what a liquored up wish utters
falling down a well. I’ve been wondering about that
missing lyric this whole time.
4.
You forget. I lie,
but perhaps we have little choice. Even
the rocks, to an ocean’s zombie nagging,
give up dreams of a wind’s brute
force for–what? conquest?
They grow
distant. A few meters
a millennia–its tithing. Though prayer
lacks the old fangs: He who pardons us:
Peace be upon Him.
5.
Heedless, I crack and score iron dirt,
my shocked limbs can still hurt
from the jolt of easing a raw spring thaw’s troubled birth,
and let that cold-speeding blue freeze-burn to a solid
my own vision of it.
Both the two ton and too-trivial
prey to stalk
still bring out the odd wolf.
Paw at the muck in the mouth of our delta, it can smell our dead there.
6.
Knowing no other means, weld a soft bend in the water.
Realize just how other rivers collapse
without giving word and still,
are rivers: a discolored heaven lording over roiling confusions of dust,
still, in their way, gasping for life,
perhaps a greater share of it.
We’ll be our old selves by summer,
The windflow tries making me understand,
a bread yellow powder signals spirits
upcurling with all that remains of who we were to each other.
Sorry spirits that would have things as they were, or should,
and would dig like a dog a secret home, for the safe keeping of valuables,
for a perishable good, acts of revival
you lovingly called The Last Ditch Efforts of the Desperate. God,
I hope not. I need us to be better friends.
Tariq Shah is the author of Whiteout Conditions (Two Dollar Radio, 2020). A Best of the Net award nominee, recent work appears in or is forthcoming from Pleiades Magazine, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, Prelude, Diagram, jubilat, Heavy Feather Review, and New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims Anthology edited by Kazim Ali (Red Hen Press, Nov 2021). A former peace corps volunteer in Mozambique, Tariq was born in Illinois and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.