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

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

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

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

only unborn children can create this much suffering. dressed as lovers they invade my senses, making me nostalgic for that which i have conquered: empty desire and shallow lust. prey to inferior men, to the structures programmed into my bones, my wheat skin. myth of loneliness, destroy yourself. i betray my ancestors’ prescriptions unto my life, the light of a million indian women fueling my rebellion. cells and jail cells. slavery, forced sex, coerced marriage. a brothel fantasy played out, mongolian-style, at bengali weddings. how much money will be enough to win the bride behind the gilded door?

the promises i made in exchange for this body. i must break them now in order to keep them, to stay on course. dealings within the bounds of bloodlines, my lies of loyalty born of sly innocence. my need, sated outside the enclosure of marital duty, evokes their revenge: headaches and my flesh drained of fire. i leave my body when they strike; the pain dulling, tangible enough to evacuate the spirit.

the skin, peeled back, reveals muscle. the power of my body to diffuse and gather energies, to move and direct their flow, subjugates my environment. transforms it. sorcery of my birth, cunning of my arrival into this place, this time. all was desired and manifested according to my will. and to what new forces will i become mother during this visit? the center of each palm flickers with certainty, invisibly building through my fingers.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

copper-lined veins
remembered fragments welded
coiled promises

death of before,
breath forgotten in waves
broken
divide unto themselves, double
helix tomorrow drawn
as fired chariot

© 2010 tahminah zaman

i have a strong urge to pick up my cell phone, scroll down my list of contacts and find someone to talk to. i reach for my bag, then pull my hand back, remembering how this hour, the sixty minutes between 12:53 and 1:53 this Saturday afternoon, is my only time to draw. my three-year-old son is with his mother a few blocks away, she may call at any moment to demand i take him back, to say she’s feeling tired, sick, fragile, who knows what her excuse will be today.

should i draw my eyelashes as they really exist on my face, or less dramatically? they’ve always been too long for my taste, and straight and unruly, crashing together at unpredictable angles. i look over at the woman, she is lying on her back, using her gunmetal gray purse as a pillow for her head, reading a book. on the cover, the name Salman Rushdie, she’s a polemic. her beauty is unsettling, strange–her features are small but intense; the jawline gentle and understating the wide brown eyes, their corners upturned, grave and discerning, the nose a tame enough shape but its endpoint unmistakably Indian. the lips of medium fullness, pink and quiet, mouth relaxed and resolute. she wears a wine-colored dress, an intoxicating burgundy, and a necklace of raw, roughly cut garnets. her hair spirals in tendrils around her face, a blackish copper under the white Berkeley sun.

she knows i am looking; she ignores my gaze, my charcoal, my moving hands. as if a glass wall stands between us, impenetrable to sound or sight.

this woman is alone, why? royal in her red dress and gems, her wind-mussed raven curls, reading a thick volume in the center of a college town, why has no man, no woman joined her Saturday outdoor reverie? the heat rises in me, my hands stop their charcoal dance, i stare at the eyes, the hair, the lips that promise seduction and certain satisfaction of mortal desire. the space around her curvaceous body, trapped in its scarlet dress, is so open, so empty. i am a man, i am subject to this type of musing. weak to the injustice of a woman this whole, this timeless, having only the company of an old Rushdie book on this first Saturday in June. anger buzzes around my head, dizzying and red like the garnets along the curve of the woman’s neck.

my cell phone, sitting beside me on my bench, erupts into its pop-rock ringtone, loudly shattering the moment. the woman glances my way, unaffected, immediately turns back to her reading. it is my ex-wife, calling at 1:29, reminding me not to be late. not to be late, which means, in her language, come early to take our son away. i put my charcoal back in its box, feeling suddenly drained of inspiration.

i look one last time at the Indian woman in red, her eyes blink as she turns the page of her novel. she gives me a small, unencouraging smile. i push my sketch pad back into my bag, get up, turn my body in the direction of my ex-wife’s apartment. as i walk away, i close my eyes and try to recall the stranger’s face, her spiraling hair, her supine posture, the blood red of her necklace and dress. next saturday at 1:53, my hands will have time to bring her back, in charcoal lines, to the People’s Park, lying in the shade of a large poplar tree. alone, so alone.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

the curiosity of your lips–pink ambassadors to a mouthful of white capricorn teeth, beautifully square and even. your knees beneath my fingers, as if there were no denim between my fingertips and your skin. knowing those joints, the hardness of their bones, would fall victim to my touch. maybe i loved you, after all, for your helplessness against me.

i regret nothing, certainly not the lesson in futility. a hundred lifetimes spent hearing words that stabbed like knives, acid raining into my growing heart. that first saturday, your breath tasted of nothing more bitter than coffee, no pain had yet been delivered from between those white, even teeth. that, like so many other realities, came later.

eight weeks after i leave you, i sit alone in bed under a down blanket, hoping it doesn’t storm tonight. praying sky’s tears don’t drum against the roof. i don’t want another reminder of those nights, last december, when it rained hard for twenty days in a row, a painted wood ceiling above us, making love to the man who lied to me, who said he wanted to live his life by my side and father my children. who convinced me that distance and my own deficiency were the reasons i had never seen his family, his hometown, his true self.

the sky is black and clear, the night cold and the moon new. a light shines in a neighbor’s window; i am not the only insomniac grieving at midnight. it is tomorrow; the sun held back for another five hours, but morning here. keep the darkness still; let the sweetness of loss absorb completely, let those wasted lifetimes coagulate, echoes of a single utterance — one that could not be silenced. speech unable to resist the temptation, the glory, of sound.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

there was the one who loved me before him, who walked away only to return two years later to say she made a mistake, you should have been my children’s mother, now there’s no return from exile. clarity came too late, too much had changed. now a lover who lacks that fire, she said, raw passion. the flame that threatened control.

you left so many times i knew the scars would be stubborn to fading. now your silence, your quiet resignation to this bitter outcome, almost drowns away the sounds of your voice denigrating me, a bracelet i built for you hurled and exploding against our bedroom wall, its bloodstone jasper pieces lost in beige carpet. i gathered those bits together, put them in your jewelry box full of my creations, to remind you of your promise to string it back together. then i left the keys on your bar, pulled the door closed behind me.

one day will you remember this: that my love alone could never heal you, could not replace your fear of your father nor compare to your mother’s worship. will you call your error, your reluctance, your regret by name? or will you deny your heart’s logic completely? to whom, if anyone, will you speak those words? in my absence, only Ganesh and Kali remain, inert atop your bureau next to that broken bracelet in its carved wood box. and will you transfer your grief to their forms? or will you stay the same: hold everything within, wondering why you lie apart from the world outside?

© 2010 tahminah zaman