The Sun is in Taurus now, right at its center, and I asked for many new gifts when the new moon came weeks ago. A cup waiting to be filled. And then she arrived, arrived on my terms, to tell me one more time before leaving that she still loves me. 5 years after our breakup.

I don’t react at first, I like seeing her, she doesn’t drain me at first. Not that much. Just listens and asks questions about my medical work. I steer the conversation away from our families, who matter less and less to us as we age; we care less and less about their approval and anyway I want to discuss freedom, not disappointments. Not demands from the external world. That was yesterday, not today, I say. There are reasons for my distance from my sisters.

I am calm and almost indifferent, I know this woman. She is leaving the country, and I weigh my attachment to her. Decide I can play with my unfeelingness, let her kiss me as she wants to. She spends one night, then the next. She tells me that she thought about me when she was alone. That she had liked it.

After we make love five years into our breakup, she asks if I still love her. Yes, I say, but am I in love?

The first night in three nights I sleep alone, I place a cushion the size of a small coffee table under my legs, lying face up. My posture better without company, at least tonight. The dollar is about to collapse, she says, that’s why she’s leaving. I wonder at the nature of our love, the fatedness of it. How we even look similar, her Mayan blood and my Bengali, her African and my Afghan bones.

The two sides of me struggle together, intent upon their conversation. The meeting necessary because I feel my soul following her abroad, recalling the need I heaved upon her when she was my closest lover. She was 28 and I only 24 then, fighting to survive among the other female college students who were as ambitious as they were penniless. She and I had become fast lovers then, immersing ourselves in the creative, destructive ecstasy of young women in love.

In the same instant, I consider the long roots feeding me here, reaching, uncompromising, into the earth of this place that becomes more and more strange to me after the ten years I spend here. Are they deep enough to feed me after the dollar collapses? I remember my desire to leave for Brazil. The plans I made until…I am too grounded here. A little immobile. And now this.

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

If you could choose to be in your father’s arms, held as a small child would be, or in a lover’s embrace, which would you choose?

Thirty years of being disappointed by men taught me that I still suffered for want of a father’s love. And so I chose him from the ones I knew, he had been a father four times. I had decided I didn’t want a sexual relationship, that would not be fatherly, I thought. I want a father’s love.

He had heard of my clinic and called to discuss his problem. I was interested only in his medical condition, lower back pain, and the lifestyle of social work and fatherhood that had caused it. But my voice, he said, my laugh had interrupted the solitary rhythm of his single man’s life. He liked that, he said. His curiosity about my personal life troubled me at first, for what did it have to do with my expertise as a doctor?

It had been a few weeks after his first call when he asked me to leave my California home to see him, to bring my mobile energy clinic to his home in Michigan. I agreed to make my first long-distance house call. I was to stay for two weeks of the summer, when my teaching work was over for the year.

I teach him meditation in the mornings, and check his chakras throughout the day, uncluttering and deprogramming them when necessary. I learn that mostly he had loved too much, had agreed to put his sons and caseload before his own health since the age of twenty-five. Had mothered as well as fathered thousands of children for nineteen consecutive years. His kidneys had carried too much and were now too heavy to bear. He had not worked for three years because of the discomfort in his lower back, treated with ultrasound waves and other modalities that only covered up the symptoms of the injury. I am to repair this damage inflicted upon his bones and organs in the fourteen days I spend here.

When we are not shopping for medicinal foods and cooking, when we we are not meditating or talking over tea and chocolate, when we are not walking alongside the small river that winds through his backyard, he fathers me. Cradles me like a child, his arms dark and muscular. I am muscular, too, but his athletic build is almost frightening, the strength of a bare-handed murderer feminizing my frame by contrast. His gentle, irrepressible masculinity, the flexibility of his temperament, a man’s protection of a woman. Gifts my father never gave me. I had told him I liked younger men, men who had not yet expended all their energies on failed marriages, childrearing, and other traumas. But I wanted the love of a father and I would accept it of him, if he had it to give, I said.

In the evenings after dinner, once the dishes are washed and the kitchen swept of crumbs, he approaches me in silence. Gathers me up and takes me to his bed, cradling me against the mound of pillows at one end. I lean against his chest and talk, otherwise motionless, listening to his responses, his low laughter.

On the fifth day of my visit to his home on the East Coast, after a few minutes on the bed I embrace him back, the scent of his male skin making me forget my resolve to love him as a daughter. And isn’t a daughter’s love for her father sexual, too? Tangled by my own heartstrings to the generosity of his affections, months of telephone calls full of undelivered caresses. To be claimed. Now.

I embrace him back, kiss his throat, my hands rubbing his chest and shoulders and stomach, the terrifying muscles pulsating with his breathing. Feel the deadliness of his abdomen — this man who could overtake me effortlessly handles me almost too gently. He presses his hands to my body, too, first tenderly sliding against my clothing and skin, then squeezing, massaging deep into me. Possessing. I can smell his desire because it is my desire, too — penetrates me even before I reach down to feel his readiness.

It is as if I am awakening from a long dream, one whose shards of nightmare have exhausted me during sleep. I curl the length of my body against him, exhaling against his cheek. Translating my signals, he makes a quick movement to place me on top of him, his gaze locking mine in place. Feeling his hardness beneath me, my lips release a sound like I am trapped. He rolls me beneath him, crushing my body against the firm bed, and I am somewhere between my body and my mind, sensation and analysis, someplace between my desire to be daughter and my need to be woman.

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

There was no hesitation in her speech; she was confident and funny and childlike in the way she entertained herself with jokes. The second time he visited her, he asked, “Did you miss me?” It had been two days. “Yes,” she said, “did you miss me?” “Maybe…” he teased. She had put her hand on his knee then, they were sitting next to each other at her kitchen table, she touched him to show herself to him. And he took his hands in hers, had looked as if across a thousand miles into her nut-brown eyes. He told her how lovely her babies would be should she have any, he squeezed her strong body, admiring it, feeling its buoyancy and resilience.

He pointed out numerous details about her body and words, he asked her a second time questions whose answers he had forgotten since their first meeting. He spoke plainly about his younger age, five years apart from her. He could not be a boyfriend, he said. He told her before he had a chance to touch her, before he could fully ingest her. He made sure to mention it early. He leaned on her listening, shy to say that sex would not keep him near often. He could not be boyfriend.

He was a foot taller, a lanky skateboarder. The density of her muscular, feminine body was concentrated into only five feet and one inch of height. They discussed their varying styles of writing poetry and genres of dance they had studied. His dry sweetness was intoxicating, he could see that from her reactions, the hands caressing him, body pressing to his. For even as she remained cool, her temperature rose when he pulled her into his lap, his rough and calloused sailor’s hands covered in the raw coconut oil she had massaged into the fingers and palms, the cuticles and nails. Romance had come like a tsunami, there was no need to make love though desire was there. The mirroring had happened, and there was no pretending it hadn’t.

His straightforwardness had been oxygen to her after so many men who could not speak for themselves, had let affections and communications crumble just after the most passionate and promising beginnings.

He stopped calling, he was unprepared for all he had learned of Laksmi so quickly. He slowed his text messages because her words were too potent. She was commanding, her lust-inspiring figure, her ringlets of scarlet-black hair, her dancer’s posture, her swordlike intellect. How she ridiculed everything into the present moment, effortless, making herself laugh at all she said. She tried not to laugh at all her own jokes, she said, that would be bad onstage. She was always thinking about performance, talking about yoga. He wondered how flexible her legs were, how he could pry them apart into a lateral split. Yoga in bed, he could see her doing that. How would she be, naked and wet and held down by him, would she push back against his pressure and insist on her own pace, her style? Or submit? He imagined her under him, her hard brown legs pulling him into her, her long, square nails scraping him as she moved her hands from his neck to his legs, spelling her names on his skin.

When her texts came, he was usually at work or with friends, it had been a week since he’d seen her. It was clear she wanted more of him. He didn’t respond to her text, not with words. What stopped him was that she wanted him in return. Did she want too much?

He went to bed alone on his sailboat, reading her unanswered text messages and thinking of her pianist’s fingers with their long, square nails pushing the buttons on her phone. She wanted his response, wanted to hear his echo meet hers across the water of the bay between them, but she would receive none. Except the reverberations of his desire, silent in his own bed. He said her name a few times, he didn’t know her last name. Clutched at his own flesh in her absence, expressed only to himself what she would have liked to witness.

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

Portals close as you neglect desire. Whether from the weakness of hesitation or fear, fire dies if it goes unfed. Don’t ignore open doors, some never return from that memory: waiting. I see your uncertainty, your self-doubt, and it is too real.

The waiting is beautiful, those words were said by someone whose love was brief and full of absence. Like the love of so many men. My father. And the others I’ve forgotten.

What will the moon’s face say tonight? Will she tell the story of the sun, who was silent in response to her signals? The magnanimous sun! Even he can’t bear the concentration of matter and energy that her beauty is, has to stay so far away in order to admire her.

© Tahminah Zaman

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

serve her, your Universe and
your Earth: from where
else does your
oxygen spring?

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

There were lessons this year, my numerological year of 8 — manifestation, achievement, miracles. Magic. The success to prepare me for year 9, ascension. Fulfillment of spiritual prophecy, the promise coming to fruition. What the Universe gives birth to, my hands are extended to receive.

Survival secure, but the world’s chaos multiplies. Throwing everything into reevaluation. Maybe it’s a year 7 for Earth. 2012 to arrive so soon, the very numbers seem to shake with anticipation. Rebirth.

Love is becoming deeper, more flexible and durable. I can feel the loosening, the quickening, the thickening of karma. Concentrating and dispersing time. We are almost still; it is as if the whole of humankind is meditating at once. Space is also dissipating as a construct — wherever consciousness exists, the cells experience fully from a distance all the ecstasy and suffering we are co-creating. The interconnectedness is now obvious, in plain view even to the blind. Too loud for any slumber to take place. The dead have been awake for so long, the living can no longer ignore the volume of their chatter. The veils have grown thin, pierced by the nails of the unborn fighting to arrive. We are giving birth to history; we are giving birth to Time.

Zaman. A new era. My father’s shortened name echoes against the languages it recalls. Meaning and sound hidden in a word’s root. If each present moment is erased to make room for the next, Time doesn’t exist except Now. Like power, depends on immediacy. Like language, only as effective as what is expressed. Like the body, cannot even leave the moment, is trapped in the constancy of transformation. Unable to ignore the miracles at hand in order to travel between notches on a manmade timeline.

Before, I existed too much in transit. Give me today.

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

Sudden visions of engagement rings chained together in the shape of a noose. Leaving lives behind. Ten thousand years of externally controlled thoughts and decisions, hiding my revolutionary nature, expressing creativity within confines of marriage, motherhood. Forced subtlety, sublimation of passion into calm, accommodating delivery. Slavery of the body, soul negotiated then promised to another. Bengali woman, show yourself. Lower back pops as I type this; releasing sexual histories engraved with my name, old healing projects and emotional ties, the familiar desire to spend my years building against the crumbling structure of a broken man. When I finally choose a whole lover, I will have learned to revere life as well as death.

I slide back into old patterns, wanting control, wanting to own the one I will love, the ones I have loved. Paralyzed in the place between the programmed self and freedom. I still long to have changed, transformed into the robot that would have made it possible to continue with disturbed lovers. Indian woman. Indian woman. Indian woman. Why is self-destruction so easy? Lingering fear of being thieved, cheated, interfered with. Not just colonial disruptions of our narrative, but the original narrative — bones and joints turned arthritic, brittle and cracking in response to foreign influence. The body still believes in arranged marriage — love as mechanism following naturally from the promise and intent. Stabilizing with time, effort, force. My history lied to me: the one who loves me will never fear my absence, will never attach to me in order to avoid loss, will never press me into a wall demanding forever.

Indian woman. Indian woman. Brown daughter of genocide. Who are you beneath your fear? Your control? Your black and white, your learned habits? Can you love without chains, without promises? Does slavery always beget slavery?

Should I decide to die an ever unmarried woman? I am not yet 32; my body still belongs more to those around me than to myself. Some never fully claim their flesh as their own. If I had made my choice when I thought I knew what I wanted, if I chose now, I would change my mind soon enough; will divorce, certainly, if I marry before 33. My hunger for stability wanes, waxes alongside my evolving manner of living. Painful myth to release, that we are the same tomorrow, will without a doubt love the same lover next year. Even if I never free myself completely from my own falsehoods, I cannot imprison myself as before. Not without consenting to abandon my worship of an unchained existence.

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

If my eyes linger on you, you will pause — so I take small glances while you are distracted, productively taken by your inner world. Once the second cup’s been drunk, I’ll read this to you. Show myself naked to you, when you become mine again.

A writer’s body hides the coursing of blood through muscles taut from storying, placing, shifting, exchanging words. Fingers sculpt sound and meaning, wheels of energy turning at ten levels of thought and action. Generativity of the flesh, synapses traveling through labyrinth of brain and spine, moving in the stillness of a stenographer’s posture. Revealing nothing but the act of documentation, the images drawn in paper and ink, each letter a brick stacked toward completion.

Breakfast dishes cleared, I close my laptop and rise to shower. Leave the bathroom door halfway ajar, enter the scalding spray that strikes me between shoulder blades. Hand against white tile wall, hair sliding down my skin and into the mesh covering the drain. Ringlet strands of black protein my scalp releases as I drag my claws through the multitudes, shampooing. Double helix of genetic knowledge, its melanic tint a bloody copper. Fumes from soap handmade with orange juice, shea butter, and turmeric fill the bathroom, making a pungent steam sauna of my morning ablutions. I wash myself, thinking of your hands at the breakfast table, playing at imagined remembrances, sequencing moments into poetic flow for publication.

There is a rustling, the door of dark glass separating me from you opens. One leg, then the other steps inside the vapor cloud around me, inhaling spice and steam. I turn to you, bright apricot skin showing and hidden in parts by cresting water drops and their visible heat. Eyes and arms reaching, you pull me gently to you. Stomachs meet. Palms squeeze my hips, fingers stretch apart to contain me, claim me; digits no longer curled to keyboard silent words twist my raven locks. Oxygen and sugar pulsing between the chambers of your heart against my throat. Loud, insistent. Masculine.

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman