It Ends Before It Begins
In your eyes a flash of lightning,
a dream, delicate as a spider crawling across
the floorboards of your mind.
I see them shining in your eyes
as you tell me history won’t remember us
over cheese fries in a Kansas city parking lot.
I offer my languages:
patience lumber, language,
live beneath the landscape
(the underbelly of living),
forgo forgiveness, it’s how you fashion
yourself an impenetrable mind,
make friends with the interiority of fear.
You cannot look at me.
Picture this,
you atop a city building
alone, sipping on something sweet,
choice of dress, the impulse of springtime,
I want to offer you impulse but you
memorized the form and I broke
the family’s line, an attempt
to outlive survival.
።
How careful it is to image
How selfish is it idea
How selfish is it to secret
How careful it is to acquire.
Diya Abbas is a first-generation Pakistani poet from the Midwest. They were named the 2022 George B. Hill Poetry Prize Winner and the Lyman S.V. Judson Awardee in the Creative Arts. Her poems are featured in Foglifter, Adroit, The Offing, BAHR Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal and others. She is currently studying Creative Writing and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison through the First Wave program.