1.
“Regurgitated Barricades” by Anuje Farhung
I can’t stop to be sad
any longer or I will have to
be sad for longer than I can
realistically stay alive. So tears
are tears and breath is
breath and life moves on just so.
So let the first shot find you.
Let it rip your skin in search
for a liver to pierce, a lung
to puncture, air
to bring into lightening
chambers. Dark and wet
as you are, you are
in need for a holy light –
and it’ll wash out your heart,
I swear – just you wait
right there for God.
2.
What is it that holds
up the sky? Mountains,
the tent pegs? Circum-
ambulating the poles?
The daily movement
in grace, standing, bowing,
kneeling, and standing again,
a holy loop and whispered words
caught on the tongue-tip unable
to take off? Do they move
the air? Does anything
move the air to fury
anymore, to floods and ravage?
3.
Not floods, Allah, not floods,
I’m sorry I said floods.
4.
But the song the water sings…
the song the air sings as
death is coming…
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5.
If everything worships
then everything mourns.
What dirges killers
sing and whom they bury
in pain, these are mindfucks
arriving by night in rooms
stood alone on cliffs of
sorrow. What holds up
the sky is the smoke rising
from the dead returning
home. What holds down
the earth is the earth
remade from the dead
returning home. What holds us
in our bodies, and we
are sorrow, is the hand
beside, patting down the earth
is the hand beside, smoothing
out the shroud, is the hand
beside, covering a face that
could be its own. If everything
loves, everything worships.
And sings what dirges the tongue
can taste upon the air.
6.
So go home, my loves.
The air sings
your return. It won’t
be long now. We’re
all headed home.
Kyla Pasha is a poet and academic from Pakistan who teaches comparative religion and cultural studies in Lahore. She is co-founder and managing editor of Chay Magazine: Sex and Sexuality in Pakistan. Her first book of poems, “High Noon and the Body”, was published in 2010 by Yoda Press, and she co-edited “Two Loves: Faiz’s Letters from Jail”, published in 2011 by Sang-e-Meel Publications. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies in the US and working on her second collection of poems.
