Tariq Shah

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.

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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.

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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.