Alainah Aamir

Valentine’s day hearts
still hang on the salon ceiling
three days after the day
which makes no sense at all.

Each heart is cut in a different
sort of grotesque because they
know nobody will notice the rough
edges, with a solid concept as this.

That is why he will leave her through
empty inboxes, bubbles of silence
he will slowly pull the wooden floor from under her
so one day she will know with certainty that there is no more need for a second dinner plate.

Sometimes we extend hands just because we know it is second nature for one to take them in a mannerism they can’t shake.

Some clothes mold themselves to adapt to the shape of whichever identity they are protecting.

Some are like my mother in my childhood, like stiff collars on the first day of school, violent refusal to adapt to what has been put before them.

Even then there are dissidents. You submerge anything in water long enough, it loses its fight.

I would like to die before I am made into a poem.

Sometimes people are one thing for long enough, you forget they were ever something else.

Nobody ever thinks of crescents when there are full moons.

There are no black holes, only all that sunshine.
You were never here, only traces.

My last message may not be, “I love you”
It may not be the apology you need
There may not even be a last message.

I have thought about my last words
More than I have ever spoken any –
I may even leave you with what you have
Already seen or heard another day.

Maybe you do not even deserve my last word
Maybe I made a monument of you with smoke and hot air,
Laying you down on grimy mirrors.

You may even be a lily waiting to float
Like my flightless words on my concentrated tongue.

I like to imagine spending monsoons in a house made of salt
Crumbling marriages and a
Loaf of banana bread, raw in the middle.

My last message may be, “Where are you? Waiting.”
You will not see this message
You are a damsel trapped in the creases of your coat
As you drive to where you think I am, where you think
I want you to be –
Not where you are needed.

“Hold still, I’m on my way.”

Something
Has crept into the house with us.

There were a few rooms free
And we thought about renting them out
Easy money and easier
Conversation,
But something else has made its way in.

We are trying to decipher when it entered
Maybe we left the doors unlocked
We did not board the windows
Either way, it is our fault.

We wonder where it is –
We only feel its jellyfish presence
It is in our atmosphere
But we wonder where it lay down its foundation
And all of our grave stones.

We wonder about the stages
But there are too many words and
Each answer halts at a question.

When?

The flowers are rotting and it is not even the season
Something has crept in and it enjoys
Gore and needles, the package.

We grasp at means to feel a sense of control
Something spreads like the plague.

I was told that my grandfather summoned us all to his grave,
I was told it meant something –
Perhaps this something is it.

Something
Has crept into the house with us
And it is taking my grandmother.

She loves you with blood running down your nose
From the bottle of diamonds you swallowed

She loves the rush of the drive to the hospital,
The wedding screen, the jewelry of needles

She is there to feed you porridge at midnight
To cry with you on bathroom floors, to wipe
The stains on your bed sheets – your wrists.

She is there when you call her with tales
Of anaesthetic-induced euphoria

She is there when you ask for the balcony view
Because you like the choice it comes with.

She is nearly there when you call her, saying
They’re letting you go – she is half there

At your meetings, always a pocketed
Apology – a bouquet of flowers with wheel marks.

She smokes like a chimney when you tell her
The seasons make you feel beautiful,

You love her even though she is boat in rocky seas
A train that never pulls in.

You are there when she calls you at half past
Something. She asks you not to call again

As she won’t be around, makes you promise
To send a message when you reach the institution.

Half a white pearl, oyster from the sea
Never a whole, largely symbolic
Of the encompassing restlessness.
Inside me is an ocean
I bear the same weight, and lightness
It is the oddest of combinations
But I find a balance.
The lull of the pill inside me
On the crevices of my plague.
It colours its effect, I am emptied.
I lie quietly in my sheets
The dreams of blood fizzle in
And out, like breezes in a field.
The second is pink, to counter thoughts
It kills my suicide and makes me silly
Like a woman on shots of alcohol and men.
When I am not white, I am bright red.
It matches my skin in its clumsy cycle.
There are voids, depressions.
Filled, come furnaces.
Who was I before our matrimony?
I am a disaster.
The waves pull in and out.
I am the atmosphere.