Poetry, faithful husband, you earn next to nothing and require everything of me: leave my refrigerator and bank accounts empty in your ardor and wildness, litter the tables with fragments of new works, ask me every day when these thirty years will be ordered. Title those three decades in the name of my last lover, the one I waited all that damn time for. The unspeakable love in those November poems, these newest stories the most poignant for I am broken open with pain today. Gather the lines, bind them into a collection dated 1981, year of the Metal Rooster, through last December. You don’t pause to ask where I slept last night.

Where were you when I was born, abandoned in an incubator? I was supposed to be a Sagittarius, a true one. Not jealous, delicate Scorpio at the brink of Sagittarius — it was my mother’s smoking that made me a month premature. Clawing with unborn talons at her uterus that housed three before me. Sound of my assisted breathing for the first four weeks.

I always wanted to be claimed early — life is simpler while belonging to someone. It’s hard to be alone, my mother told me when I was too young to protect myself from her words. It’s hard to be alone. Engraved on every one of my cells, wasn’t I unshielded from the force of her loneliness? But my last name was changed, an invisible weight already on the weakest finger of my left hand. My identity the property of experimental literature. The kind that unseats and deprograms, slaughters the master and his narrative — chained to my pen, freeing everyone else.

Little angel of murdered doubts, you are the one who never leaves, who wakes me each morning with a chase around the perimeter of my mind, pulls the thoughts from an unwilling throat, flicks away the scab grown over my heart where those other fingerprints are still visible. Face washed with saltwater from the corners of my eyes, purified of my transgressions. Unashamed of my imperfections. Only you, besides me, know my ugliness. You’re not possessive like me, too free to fear the end of anything; you are a humble map of veins, green under my earthen copper skin, unseen except for those who know my marital status. Private. Wrists bound for life by the ribbon of words that extends from my mouth, my fingers, fountains from my womb — fiery tsunami of my voice, loudness of this body’s truth. Delayed expression liberating itself, in spite of empty noise and silence of annihilation, through you. Your unconditional nature, what I may never understand.

I turn away from the external world to recall how, with you, I became love, how your curling script records the shapes of my tears when death is more attractive to me than this limited incarnation, how the contract between us was written without conditions when I was a child. Too young to know the gravity of a lifelong agreement. But your presence is bottomless, the lingual caress of communication. In my valley of destruction you find me carving a labyrinth, call my names to remind me who I am.

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

I am a young sorceress, love, so young I cannot even imagine the power in my hands, my unexpressed need. How I used words to invite and then reject you. What I see in you of myself, I could not bear to look. As my marred vision clears, I want you here, call you with my hands to bring you close again.

I went to see you last night, knocked at your door. No answer came. Now I wait for the Universe’s hand to move. This morning I touched the place where I felt the scab before — it’s gone. Almost completely. The skin smooth again, the way it was when we met. When I was beautiful to you and corrected you: it’s yourself, mostly, that you are seeing. When you look at me, you make me more beautiful. To be seen by you. I told you.

Dark power, Kali Ma, you destroy so beautifully, death so lively you can’t be contained, somehow you overfill every glass. Dramatic. Your vibration is a mystery: both high and low. Your wand whose lightning does annihilate too much. Now I know you. Flavor too strong to forget after this last bitterness.

The universe reassembles herself, reordered according to the present, the singular instant of now. This one guarantee. Where the kiss arises, even if erased thereafter.

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

winding, deep, eleva
ting skin and earth to
ether, either-or and
and, becoming a
single lane of traffic
oncoming and go
ing recentr
ing memory around
pretty limbs

enclosure of lips and
shoulder, claws smooth
from scratching surf
ace water,
fingerprints em
bedded now up
on my hist
ory

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

your silence is almost
cozy, it’s
so familiar

like a facial feature,
the expected
delivered.

oh daddy, how’d you get
so good at neglect? years
of not there and
how that became
your name

it’s a talent you
have,
rabbit and hat
leaving like that

the quiet reverbs
against all surf
aces of my being

my words a ball hitting
mortar and bricks, as
if your ear were just a paint
ing on the wall

waiting

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

love is psychotic
business.
neuroses will surface
during its time and
after it’s passed.

when you say you love
I hear silence. deaf to
even your shouts, my
sweet

still spiraling, freefall
ing, along with all
this matter
the when, the what, the why
are nothing more
than details to
describe

death delayed by laughter,
erased pain,
a symmetrical reflection,

the self sung in a
lover’s voice

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

as if I am sculpted
by your hands
I become new
to myself

a fresh vision,
unfamiliar
mirror
or lens

you refract me
differently

show me my
light from a
sideways
horizon

“I’d like to draw
your eyes,” you said.

“I would love to be
painted.”

And you laughed.

I am a Picasso
but rarer,
the goddess Justice
but fairer,
in your eyes

I am better

purified by unseen waters
the way you look at me
stalls my departure
feeds me a flavor I haven’t
tasted
teaches me something I should
have known, or knew
but forgot. You remind me
that tomorrow is today

the details don’t exactly
matter

if

love that went wasted,
love that faded or waited
too long to speak,
love that disappointed,
that lied by not disclosing,
love that neglected our origins,
love that belittled and bruised,
love that was refused,
love that liberated
has recycled itself
at the very center of the earth

to give birth
to this

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

push those stale
faded
tasteless hard
specks off my plate

and wait
to be served
the whole cake

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

Arms and forces
held close
shield and rule
with chaos

outer shell
shed to receive
reveals blood’s wetness
fragile heartbeat
tireless ego

bone and tender
flesh, sweet tissue
behind skin walls
iron bars
brick
boulder
shoulders separate
to let enter, to be
defenseless unto love

© 2011 tahminah zaman