he wants me to love his home
and the thicket of trees around
it, he wants my female heat to
surround it,

wants me to love how much
he spends on food, he wants me
to spend all my money, too. he wants me to
need the sparkle in
his straight white teeth,
rhythmic moves and poems
in his speech,

his six-figure job. his thousands of shoes.
the hats and the belts that he may
never use. he wants me to touch them,
he wants me to say that I can’t live
without them, they’ll make me stay.

he wants me to reach for him. but I don’t.
because what I’ll touch is what I
don’t want.

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

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

all that allows her to breathe
is hers again,

repairing from within
she walks around the sun

and one
of these returns –
all the hidden appeared
the sky cleared of stolen
clouds, matter re
verted to its first chem
ical form

she slumbers once more

plates shake and argue,
oceans turn over with her
dream states
symmetry slides
into chaos

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

nerve ends shred when
Mercury does this

when it works, the body
is a del
icate machine
each of its parts
movable, the fragile
mechanics operate
invisibly, robotic
unpredictable energies
heating water to
the temperature of
your name

and when he returns, I
will have much to say
all the knots to un
ravel pages of thought
repressed now by silence
and gesture, a shut
down of sound

© 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

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

In the moments between your hands, your kisses, your voice whose echo reverberates through all the waters and tissues of me, I recall you: your feet at my doorstep. The room you entered a closet, I hadn’t told you to walk around the side of the house. Had probably been too nervous. Because it was you.

You who I had somehow loved since the first glance. You smiled at me, you say, do I even remember that? I just stared. My psychic’s eyes looking hard into your soul. I needed to see what was there. I had never liked anyone with long hair before. You and I, both wearing all black, we who rarely do. Bright purples and greens more our style.

I was too weak to drive myself to Eastside Arts that night, I had had to ask someone to pick me up. Had entered the room quietly in clacking black heels, trying to tiptoe. We were late. I had to stand against the wall. Not far from you. Within a few steps, maybe.

What did I see that made me look twice? I must have recognized you.

From elsewhere.

Elsewhen.

Cradle of my muscled heart, somehow I measure myself against your desire. Caressed by so many men’s eyes, even their hands when they can make it look appropriate, I still look for a certain starvation in you. That’s how it should feel to not taste me, to not swallow me almost brutally, as you do. I want you hungry for me. It’s what I wait for, to see if you love as I love.

Unlike the song. I can’t put you on repeat. Your silence doesn’t fascinate me, not really. Neither does your patience, waiting until you are so desired that you are needed. Because I need. I desire. Can’t forget the little words, the pieces of me I can only see when I hear you, speak to you.

Voice of my voice. Sex of my sex. The song makes it real. Outside of time. Distance and separation, what other lovers crave. Your presence such that your absence crushes me. The way your passion does. I want to be awake and asleep with you at once. The way we are together and apart. Maddening. Life and death simultaneous and one. What an era to love.

© 2012 Tahminah Zaman

regenerated
cells, oxy
gen and marrow and stone
of bone
blood and black ringlets
double-helixed
genetics
name me in
the same colors
change my tones

and pitch overnight
switch everything about
me to the new
me

this one who is fearless
because of you

two

I love you, that means
I’m not afraid

dissoci
ated, dis-occident
ed by the imp
act of this
quickening,

patterned memory
deprogrammed too ab
ruptly, half-absent
half-dizzy

your touch returned to me

© 2010 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