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

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

© 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

© 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

words jump from page to page like migrants attempting to find their place. the body is here, too, the whole body’s force, manipulating their song, fingers exchanging, transforming, sliding their currency of meaning. a wealth of music, extravagant choreographies of thought and sound. soundtrack of death and living.

the expression itself becomes the retreat, reclusion into the flesh; feeling the blood, the bones, the sinew and heat of pain, resistance, release, power. there is no one alongside me, i am not isolated. only an invisible film around me, penetrated by all i allow myself to experience. walls are unnecessary now, natural boundaries suffice to regulate everything necessary. food, water, speech, thought, breath.

as the cells rebuild themselves, sleep eludes me. when i dream i am announcing myself to the world as if my voice is only now being heard. surrounded by reflections of my inspiration, artists in celebration. and in the background, my two enraged, subdued sisters watching from a distance, their eleven children scattered into the joyous crowd.

two sisters my elder and estranged, the loss that made these creative works vital, grief that could not be expressed except in the abstract, explosions of syllables and rhythmic exaggeration. my words are not angry but punish with truth. by the time i am done talking we are alone together, the three of us, without the disguises, without the other people we use to draw distance between ourselves. the silence is louder than everything that came before.

identities strung together by genetics, blood tangling history’s limbs, birthdays and personalities repeat to incise the inherited fear of self we mirror in one another. circles of time go incomplete, spiraling into uncrackable codes, unreachable meaning.

put one foot ahead, turned out at the toe. fly.

© 2011 tahminah zaman

three years ago, before i spiraled into my last dark affair, i spent Thanksgiving alone. estranged from my family, the only uncoupled woman in my constellation of friends, i stayed home. the house was empty of my roommates and i wrote and wrote. i had expected to feel isolated, to devolve into depression. instead, i was soaked in the silence of freedom from other people’s expectations. from others’ needs.

for two years thereafter, i was starved for myself but knew only that something was missing. i had enclosed myself in a painful waltz with a man unable to understand me; the understanding itself seemed the only lack. it was a hole i tried to fill, to cover with the soil of my effort. pulled into the knot of duty, those two years i served interests outside myself given to a lesson that holes in love can never be hidden, that what would relieve me of my emptiness was a permanent removal of my lover’s pain. today is a revisitation of the holiday i spent alone three years ago, unneeded, needing nothing.

the sun loses itself behind the tall, silver buildings of downtown Oakland, their skins reptilian, covered in glassy scales of windows. just as i notice the lack of wind this afternoon –it is almost 4pm — i am blinded by sunlight for a full minute as i walk along the shore. memory, regret burned away by its light. i am warmed.

the wealth of holiday solitude contrasts hard with all the years i thought i would lose to large, obligatory family gatherings; weeks and money spent preparing for feasts and gift exchanges, molding myself to social norms against which my performance as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter and sister, would be judged. i look into the chest in which i pile all my present desires: the scripts for those roles are no longer there. my plans are so different from just twelve months ago, i am unrecognizable even to myself.

a mallard walks out of the water and into my path, waddling its plump body atop two tiny webbed feet. i look back upon the centuries i have spent here, scrubbing the earth clean of its pain, its endless limitations. was my time given for nothing, then, for where did my self travel while i entered the dialogue between souls and bodies? intervening in earthly matters, especially where they cross with the phenomenon of spirit, transferring my fire and intellect, my nurturing and ablution to every being i pass — were lives spent, incarnation after incarnation, well spent?

i weep for a moment, still walking, at the thought of futile time. ambition. i look at myself, content to give of myself, accepting others’ need for my healing, my teaching, my devoted service. receiving my students, the ones to whom i have given part of my life force, unconditionally — making them laugh, turning a fear on its head to show its transparency, transforming raw materials into medicine with nothing but my fingers and intuition. i see myself having chosen teaching, healing, changing, transmuting, as an unexpected expression of my wholeness. not brokenness.

the empty space within me unoccupied, i watch the ice walls formed around my lungs, my heart, my throat, ignite and liquefy as i am penetrated by the present. given the choice between my ability to change all that surrounds me and my desire for what i have yet to taste, the flavors, the loves that require no restoration, no effort.

the sun is setting when i reach my doorstep after four miles and eighty minutes of movement along the tightrope separating then from now, 365 days divided between one universe and another. life before and after a thousand twisted questions whose answers bleed me of all illusions.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

yesterday i visited that old yoga studio, the one we used to visit together. windows facing the lake, heat cranked to taste like midsummer, mirrors and mist of human sweat. as i was leaving, i remembered an afternoon that you went without me.

i am at the cafe across the street, teaching writing to someone on the sidewalk. when your class is almost finished, i buy red and orange blossoms from the old woman’s flower stand next door, walk to the the doorway where you will exit at any second. hide around the wall’s edge, holding your bouquet behind my back. wait to see you lumbering down the brick steps toward me.

reddened and heavy with exhaustion, you finally appear ten minutes later, eyes trained upon the next step down, not seeing me until you reach the bottom. i give you a moment to recognize me, then bring the flowers to the front of my body. offer them to you.

“are those for me?” your question against the cold gray day. we start for home then — this was when we lived together — and put the flowers in a vase for the dinner table. i chop onions, garlic, tomatoes, spinach, warm olive oil to brown them all in a pan with sea salt, the lamb cubed, peppered and waiting, on the countertop next to me, to be added to the mix.

my hands are mechanical, precise as i prepare our food. the kitchen is so small, i sense you inches behind me. i look up from my cooking to see you gaze at the red and orange French tulips on the table, their green stems wet inside their crystal vase. and your eyes, tears escaping their corners.

“is it the onions?” i put down my cleaver and reach above the stove to find the vent switch, but you catch my hand and pull me to you. “no, it’s not.” your voice is low, your face crumbling, eyes closing as if in sorrow. “thank you for my flowers.”

shaken violently from a dream, i see you open, a canyon exploded from a shift of the earth’s plates. your arms are around my waist and i encircle your neck in response, tipping my forehead to touch yours. you are such a different lover now than in all other parts of your day, the long hours of pinstriped dress shirts and your glass desk, reassuring investment clients that the recession will be gentle on them. where does that businessman go when i give him flowers? where does the other man come from, this one with surprise tears and a battered soul?

i say nothing, my cells are silent words that speak for me. when we are like this, when you shock me into remembering how little i know about you, i am left with only the understanding that i live to love you, to give everything i know to you, to mend all the ruptures your body and memory carry. somehow these functions have become my name.

a year after nights under a wood ceiling and hard rain, i gather the letters of my being to spell myself anew. who am i without the certainty of your brokenness? the heavens shout their warning. instants later, an electric current dims the starfire, parting the sky down the middle. the water of her weeping descends as if to fill all the chasms in the earth, to push mountains to the center of cities. you and i, now miles and millennia apart from one another. silence and punctured clouds where, once, our hairlines touched.

© 2010 tahminah zaman