Blackout Nerves
Stone-jawed,
our bodies lock & stiffen into
silver molds, ironed-out
icicles, freedom land where a blacked-out
swelling reigns,
where your hand clenches
around the salt of a shining sea;
night-long ruin borne across broken tides
of slumbering heat.
For this night to exist
it must be passed from family
to family, dragon’s breath
limping out each daughter’s
throat—
cold tongue blue, lumped,
set aflame by the sound of doorbell—
& the mother, rushing to answer
in her gray coat that remembers,
if not the wizened, frozen apartment
of a decade ago,
then the pattern of a new city,
laid bare like a half-finished blueprint,
or the light it never saw, slow song
of a city whimpering
with hot rain, music filtered in
by heavy sunlight,
& her own warm body, hardened like baked clay,
eyes eclipsed by the weight
of seagulls sweeping above—city shimmering
in radiant heat, in the sweet-smelling
sigh of its limbs uncoiled. The penalty
of inexperience is a law
I can’t remember. So instead I gulp water in this beautiful
place. Swallow the cold
that led me here, under layered blankets,
waiting for each star-shaped
rime crystal to spread throughout
my network of nerves,
landing first at my center, my heart,
leaping gently like a young bird
learning her first flight.
Ayesha Asad is from Dallas, Texas. Her work has been included in the 2020 Best of the Net Anthology, and her writing appears or is forthcoming in PANK, DIAGRAM, Cosmonauts Avenue, Sundog Lit, Menacing Hedge, Kissing Dynamite, DREGINALD, and elsewhere. She has been recognized by Creative Writing Ink Journal and the Robert Bone Memorial Creative Writing Prize. Currently, she studies Literature and Biology at the University of Texas at Dallas. In her free time, she likes to dream.