SOPHIA NAZ – Glen Ellen, CA, USA

What’s the warp and what the weft
Running through this weaving?

-Kabir

by the tongue where tomorrow
and yesterday are one, call

out juxtaposition of the scroll

sutra of future past and tense present

to court of recall

ash – snow of extinction, settler dust

the milk glass moon – gazing
in tombstone silence above Khan Younis,

soon this will be a view abridged

our museum shoulders each drag and shrug

Jabaliya, the abattoir of Gaza City
tiny ocean

in the land where yesterday
and tomorrow are one

of blood-soaked gauze

my first born

on replicating screens shape sifters ingress

a river that never sleeps is a woman

staple seams of plastic, viral

sieve at airport lounges, arrivals, departures, stations of belonging in crosshairs

steeping into seas, seas rising into clouds, clouds falling into grains
grains moaning into ears.

playing on a loop, cynical, cyclical

a dog whistle swallows the tidal pearl of Haji Ali

& night & day the avian leviathan crane

dark water kissing feet of her dead, aqueous return

homelessness lodges in the throat, orphaned cursive, bend

of sound
all the carcinogens we cannot see

circling crowds to crosscheck caste with biometrics

each ordinance decrees their disappearance: nouns
exist as yeast, ambient absence, holes in bread
make us kin, even
in the breaking

East of whose meddling?/ West of Asia

hearts beat & breathe beads of deadly heat

liminal dove, hoverer
halfway house of heaven and earthly shove, bomb blast, feather-singed

on curved concrete hemline, they ripple, reappear

exploded h/earth, no millimeter unscarred,
be/holder of charred

the scenes necklace, repeat, rosaries of despair

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Sophia Naz is a South Asian-American bilingual poet, artist, author, editor, and translator. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; in 2016 for creative nonfiction, and in 2018 for poetry.

Her most recent poetry book is Bark Archipelago Weavers Press, Mar 30, 2023