only unborn children can create this much suffering. dressed as lovers they invade my senses, making me nostalgic for that which i have conquered: empty desire and shallow lust. prey to inferior men, to the structures programmed into my bones, my wheat skin. myth of loneliness, destroy yourself. i betray my ancestors’ prescriptions unto my life, the light of a million indian women fueling my rebellion. slavery, forced sex, coerced marriage. a brothel fantasy played out, mongolian-style, at bengali weddings. how much money will be enough to win the bride behind the gilded door?

the promises i made in exchange for this body. i must break them now in order to keep them, to stay on course. dealings within the bounds of bloodlines, my lies of loyalty born of sly innocence. my need, sated outside the enclosure of marital duty, evokes their revenge: headaches and my flesh drained of fire. i leave my body when they strike; the pain dulling, tangible enough to evacuate the spirit.

the skin, peeled back, reveals muscle. the power of my body to diffuse and gather energies, to move and direct their flow, subjugates my environment. transforms it. sorcery of my birth, cunning of my arrival into this place, this time. all was desired and manifested according to my will. and to what new forces will i become mother during this visit? the center of each hand flickers with certain ability, invisibly building through my fingers.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

the freeway exit where my sister took her own life last year, park boulevard. i passed it feeling that maybe it didn’t happen. is my body, my soul, capable of such massive forgetting? she returns to me when i cross solano avenue in albany, a place we never walked together. a haze of rage and disbelief shields me from that indescribable death. the truth descends with the gravity of saturn and earth combined, a leaden, muddy burden. before i can realize that i have abandoned my body for a moment while i grieve, i am eating baba ganoush, the meal we shared most often. too much tahini, so much i can hardly taste the eggplant. lemonade speckled with pulverized mint leaves, their aroma purging the pain of remembering.

there is something inescapable about writing, unpredictable as to what words will write themselves next. like memory, a string unbroken by its very brokenness, the pieces of a shattered window, unified in their defiance of unity. the heart is bruised and bent in a rhythm of an ordered disorder, crumbs of past and future bleeding the present of its seeming certainty and wholeness. the body responds to signs cemented into the landscape: a brick wall, patch of grass, the coroner’s office, a stop sign emblazoned with letters of a secret alphabet. what remains is the movement between static elements, wind forcing apart the branches of a tree, buildings in ruin, fresh flowers thrust into a vase in the center of chaos.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

there was the one who loved me before him, who walked away only to return two years later to say she made a mistake, you should have been my children’s mother, now there’s no return from exile. clarity came too late, too much had changed. now a lover who lacks that fire, she said, raw passion. the flame that threatened control.

you left so many times i knew the scars would be stubborn to fading. now your silence, your quiet resignation to this bitter outcome, almost drowns away the sounds of your voice denigrating me, a bracelet i built for you hurled and exploding against our bedroom wall, its bloodstone jasper pieces lost in beige carpet. i gathered those bits together, put them in your jewelry box full of my creations, to remind you of your promise to string it back together. then i left the keys on your bar, pulled the door closed behind me.

one day will you remember this: that my love alone could never heal you, could not replace your fear of your father nor compare to your mother’s worship. will you call your error, your reluctance, your regret by name? or will you deny your heart’s logic completely? to whom, if anyone, will you speak those words? in my absence, only Ganesh and Kali remain, inert atop your bureau next to that broken bracelet in its carved wood box. and will you transfer your grief to their forms? or will you stay the same: hold everything within, wondering why you lie apart from the world outside?

© 2010 tahminah zaman

my travels have taken me to so many worlds, through eras i have forgotten. the temporary nature of everything, the permanence of pain, have scarred my soul beneath the surface of my skin. when you were taken from me i could no longer speak your name. robbed of my reflection, i carried the memory of losing you in my pocket. hundreds of years have passed and the terror of abandonment remains.

this time, a cellar wrapped in gray light becomes my private chamber. i sit alone remembering all the remnants of you; the gentleness of your gaze, percussion of your laughter, fullness of grinning lips, sweat the texture of silk soaking skin and cotton sheets, the grip of your arms around my body in sleep. the darkness within permeates the room, emptying itself from me. were you taken so that the next time we met, i would value you even more? god is a careful teacher, her lessons exploding illusions. life is not forever; only a few years or decades in which to express my love, my ecstasy, my gratitude at your return.

this time, stay. this time, grow old beside me over a whole lifetime: making love and eating together, laughing and grieving as one, moving with fingers entwined. this time, let me love you longer, i am a young woman, i have much to give. my devotion is as old as the earth, i have saved this sweetness for centuries, silent and incomplete. choose me.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

of course, a lack of readiness. the last time around i was coerced into silence, into behaving within the chalk outlines of unforgiving rules. obedient. then, i returned toward the sign of sagittarius, overturning all i obeyed before. turning principles on their heads, watching the reversals of gravity and matter, documenting the movement from tradition to freedom. it is natural, to some extent, to fear that which we do not understand; easier to dismiss the unknown than to admit fear; simpler to explode in frustration than submit to humanness.

so many cycles of birth and death, rebirth, i’ve forgotten the knowledge i carry from before. the remembering is jarring, i find holes torn in my being from another time, another body i don’t recall. was my skin the same wheat brown, did my eagle’s eyes stare red into sun then? did my nails grow square into claws i was not allowed to use for self-defense, as i do now? hundreds of years spent learning a single lesson: the journey of self-discovery blooms from within. a thousand opened doors but he doesn’t enter. temple of desire, close your gates now.

within the stillness, between lessons, i sit alone. lost and gained, the principles and rules change. moving into the future, there is always a mark on that which is left behind. hurdles transcended, fading with each forward step. what kind of lover does a priestess, a sorceress, a magician take? the next destination, here. an instant suspended midair. no longer waiting but knowing.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

the moment of impact occurs, orbits into the past, reoccurs and remembers itself. as if a vital organ is removed, a limb amputated, a man castrated, one color segregated from another; a form shattered by an arbitrary force.

. . .

sometimes the worlds eclipse, and the places where we met–to eat, to walk together, to talk about the listening, to laugh–make your presence so real. the corner with a bus stop bench where i saw you after work one day last june, and it was my turn to pay for lunch. i walk across the street from that corner five days a week now, because i still work there. it’s october of the same year and you’ve been dead for three and a half weeks.

when the pieces of the heart fall away, the underpinnings become visible. what kind of structure has built itself in that tender, enclosed space? what underlies the exterior, the living red that is designed to shatter and reinvent itself?

the doctor told me to expect either diarrhea or unstoppable tears the weekend after treatment. she said i was reliving the moment of impact, the instant i found out about your death, the experience of those seconds, the first hours in which it was confirmed, your name checked against the report made by the town’s coroner.

my lover and i gathered your eyeglasses, sneakers, phone and drove them to the coroner’s office to be joined with the rest of you there, in a fridge somewhere behind the generators at the back of the building. M., my lover, told me to try not to think about that, but the coroner said that your body was “unviewable”–it was easy, then, to know that you had been destroyed. by the impact. shattered to pieces by the force of a freeway car at six a.m., long before traffic slows to stop-and-go.

it was still dark when you left. by the time my alarm crowed at six, you were gone, your car out of sight where it had been parked outside. the front doors of the house were unlocked, the television on loud. you and your purse had disappeared. i thought you had driven home, not onto the freeway onramp a mile away, not pulled over and left your new car on the shoulder, not stood between the lanes without your shoes and glasses and waited for a fast-moving car, not stepped in front of it.

not died at twenty-three.

it is the places i remember being with you, the reality and gravity of your flesh, my spirit leaning against the vibrations of your voice, where i cross into the moments you were here. in the days after your death, i see myself where you were, waiting for death to claim you by force. using the car as a bullet, an actual gun became unnecessary. which parts of you remained after the first shattering? did the cells know to expect that sudden dispersion? did you feel the ones that followed? my cells imagine they are yours, over and over again, stretching themselves to recreate the moment you were taken away.

you told me you wore green on purpose that day, the day you had asked to meet again. our meeting turned to evening and you stayed the night, silent in the next room.

. . .

before retiring after midnight, i slice cucumbers for my swollen eyes, the bags of water that have collected beneath each one. unsightly patches of red mark the tears that scratched my face today, when remembrance of you became inescapable. any tasks i could complete, even if i could accomplish much in this halted state, cannot re-member those ruptured cells and limbs, cannot gather the blood that flowed away into a stain on a gasoline-streaked highway.

the clouds move, the light shifts as sunset nears dusk. gold shafts of sunlight break, and are broken by, the blanket of gray heading north. twilight paints colors that mirror dawn, marking the time of Maghreb prayer, and a new moon rises.

© 2009 tahminah zaman

and borrowed land to feed you
falling bloodily away.
where they touched earth,
they were named
Bangladesh and Pakistan.

surely you recall
your mother’s final exhalation;
the ulcered belly
whose memory of bearing, once
–a world away from her birthplace–
your baby flesh,
was buried with her
in her grave.

down the front of my body,
the tearing of Punjab
into two
leaves a gash, stapled over,
crusted with the salt of red tears;
i do not weep as my daughter
washes away the used tissue,
i do not cling to what must
be released.

my children’s feet will step
across the scar
that made–unlike nature–
three from one:
pieces whose forms fit
snugly together
each unclaimed by the other,
abandoned.

© 2009 tahminah zaman

my key lets me into a huge manor, the heavy oak door swinging inward to welcome me. on my right is a raised living room, walled, with arches cut into it. one of the arches has a cloth hanging, a transparent cloth. once i open the door, i feel someone inside the house. i tense, expecting to see an intruder. rather than removing my boots i wear them into the foyer, dirtying the polished wood floor beneath my feet.

through the first archway, where the cloth hangs, i see the moving silhouette of a woman. her back is to me, dark hair flowing against her long tunic. she is walking away from me. i take a few more steps and look through another archway, open and unclothed. i see a brown woman picking up a prayer mat, a jah namaaz, rolled up after use. it is my mother, my muslim mother who has been dead for almost three years.

she is wearing her glasses, her tunic is a deep gray-blue that reaches the floor. in a moment she is before me and i embrace her, kissing her cheek and descending to my knees. her feet sit in platform sandals, the kind she wore when she was alive because she said she couldn’t walk without a little bit of heel anymore. i kiss each of her toes, starting with her right foot. i don’t know why i start with her second toe.

do i rise and embrace her again after that? i don’t know. the dream stretches on and on, one of my sisters enters the dream, the one i grew up with. the one i was a baby with. there are others around, other women. during one moment in the dream, the three of us are together and i can’t stop crying. my mother, after all this time, is still telling me not to cry, not realizing that the coming together of this world and the next is overwhelming for the living.

i was sleeping next to my lover when my mother visited me in this dream. i had been praying for a visit from her, i had been praying for a beautiful dream to interrupt the obscure, twisted ones that seemed to be filling my mind every night and morning. i had blamed my mother in life and after her death, i had promised when i washed her body before her burial to forgive her, let everything go, and yet some resentment remained. it pushed her spirit away. she stopped her visits during my waking hours because the ghostliness of them scared me. it was like living in a ouija board, like i did when i was younger. fascinated by the power of calling spirits to me. but i prayed for her return, i asked for a peaceful reunion, and i was granted my desire.

i recall the tan cowboy boots against the pavement, the happiness in my step as i heard my lover’s voice on the phone. i turn the key into an unknown mansion, and the dream begins again.

© 2009 t zaman

you, my love, are trapped in mumbai today, thousands of miles away from the fake turkey meat and pear cranberry sauce in my mouth. you are there for a wedding whose four-day-long grandeur has been shaved down to just a small ceremony and reception at the end of this long weekend. thanksgiving day for you meant seeing the streets, schools, and city buildings shut themselves away beneath a blanket of shock. and, after all, weren’t you supposed to go to that fancy hotel that night, the night they started taking hostages and killing people for being born in the wrong countries? your family was to go there to celebrate someone’s birthday. something got in your way, and you didn’t go.

i watch the prayers written in arabic on the pages of my holy Qur’an, i imagine they are spelling your name, your family name, the gujurati syllables of your signature. the lucky name your parents gave you. i know you are there, in your bed, somewhere in mumbai away from the rooms where people are hiding and lying about their origins, trying to save their own lives. where lakes of blood and purses litter the lobbies of hotels and the hallways of hospitals, strewn with the bodies of people murdered by men who called themselves muslim. they knew about this yankee holiday, those men who chose to punish those they decided were responsible for what’s wrong in the world.

all this outside your door and yet i know you are safe, in bed, your hands searching for me, invoking me across a thousand national borders, across the ten hours of dragged time between us. feeling my body cover yours, breathing my flesh around you. i know you are listening, looking for an opening into peace, into hope, gripping yourself against all your memories of me, wanting me. your desire brings me into your room. you touch me, finding my face against yours, breasts pressing into you, my hands reaching for the parts of you that miss me most.

“on monday,” you say, “only ten more days.” until you are home. until the space between us dissolves into one long memory of separation, recalling the miles of telephone wire that bring your voice to me, these nights alone in a bed that’s grown too big without you. the single line that connects yesterday to today is a gash through which you will slip back to me. this leaving and returning a rhythm of loving, the illusion of separation to be disproven one more time.

© 2008 tahminah zaman