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

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

how can I not see you?
How can I not know
your shapes
and flavors?

Centuries slide against
memory, each lifetime
unveiling me more

The galaxies remember
me when I
forget my history,
my names written
on all the planets I
have loved, lips I
have touched.

My attempts to escape
my own beauty,
my own worth,
have failed. Necessary
blemishes perfect me:

Now that I am all
alone in the Universe
with you, how can I
not love you?

© 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

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

© 2012 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

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

wombs burst with babies
ovaries heavy
with duty
destiny
biology
pregnancy after pregnancy

barren of solitude and move-
ments unwatched
leaves topple like book pages
from branches, arms belabor
a hundred tasks, machinelike
inside four walls, the mind retreats,
compromises, bends to baby’s
demands

time shrinks to contain the smallness
of baby’s hands
a mother waters her seeds
deferring desire
stretching tomorrow for decades

girl is named mother
when she exits the womb,
the world expectant of
her offerings: distended
belly, years sold into
distraction, soul
delivered on the altars
of male gods

exit, entrance
vessel to house
and replenish war-
destroyed numbers

hands to build
more daughters
to work and
birth, sons
for worship and
battle

a body bearing so much fruit
pulls hard on her roots
cycling blood, death
dawn, flesh
fades

© 2010 tahminah zaman

Fingers of desire reach for you, frustrated. Is this affinity? The cement wall between us cold, an impulse to control time and the space between us. Love offers itself as excuse for the hard surface of wanting; but is it just that i’d like to own you?

As I near thirty, I am stripped of all I believe I know. What is love outside ownership and control? Fickle as wind and less reliable, occasional. Unpromising, bare of pretense. the moment and nothing more, perhaps a string of moments. At most, a memory in motion.

I am a body housing a spirit, I am a spirit traveling in a vessel made of water and fire. Behind me the sweet wreckage of a thousand lives: mother and warrior, teacher and sorceress. Too many loves to name, even to remember. The future releases all contained in the past; the present frees all time to continuity. In death I will shoot into the stars again; in death I shall forget, once more, my will to direct and contain. bursting into countless fragments to find my wholeness, my holiness, unattached to all else.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

to come, that which surpasses the realm of flesh. stone formed around principles, in time, cracks. bursts open hesitation.

lead lips to water, clear lungs of lead, shake the tree of being until her leaves fall away, expose her branches naked. the earth seeded and wet, there is nothing more to be done. the green will reveal itself, flowers arrive when due. not before. nature never tardy, the sky never dry, never cruel, without reason. remember, and wait.

© 2010 tahminah zaman