The Epidemics of Desire

- Tarfia Faizullah

Through leaves curling into delicate
fists, I walk before dawn across Franklin,

past doorways where the dark scent
of urine rises stronger than coffee brewing

behind the counters of this Lebanese diner
where I twist warm and worn forks and knives

into batons of flimsy cotton. Across town,
you are doing the same, I know—and soon

we will be hefting in our hands trays
filled with bowls of soup, neat wedges

of sandwich you will slide across tables
to customers, smile with blue eyes. They

will not ask you where you are from, or
how long you have been in this country

these mornings I tie back my black hair,
line as usual my eyes with black kohl. How

like those boys of my youth you look:
unmarked, smooth as the pressed white shirts

they wore days they knelt at the classroom
altar, offered up again their bright tongues.

I line the fork and knife up with each edge
of paper napkin and twist, begin again, trying

to get this work of the hands right, recalling
your stories of summers spent carting boxes

of cold beer from bar to bar, satisfied
with the day only if not a single bottle broke

as they do here each night, glittering shards
knotting sidewalks where men lean against

brick walls, their eyes and skin as dark as mine.
This morning, too, they called out to me as they

do, though I said nothing, unsure whether it is
affection or aggression that volleys the air

between us. Already the tables are filling up,
so I wipe them down, empty ashtrays, and smile

at men in business suits asking me to "say
something in Arabic." I think of the man

on Monument you told me tripped and fell
from a ladder, how another man stumbled into step

beside you, exclaimed, Look at that
nigger! What did you wish you had said,

or done? Easy enough to forgive the man
his assumptions, but I have always wondered

what it is like to move through the world
in a skin like yours, bearing a face that women

adore, and men trust—its blue eyes framed
by a shock of blond hair, golden as the Turkish

tea I pour for customers as light startles
each wide window. Perhaps you wanted

to say, I hate that word, or, Shut up, or perhaps
you were thinking again of the poem you had

been carrying with you for weeks, whether
to exchange the drift of sparrows rising

from a sycamore for a flare of starlings
startled from a pine by a freight train. But

I imagine, unfairly, your silence: a moment
only you knew as shock ushering in the day

and its faint beginnings, the light just flaring
out onto rings of grass circling Stonewall Jackson

on his horse, gazing always northward.
Al-Jazeerah blares from the small TV

in the back room, and I continue to fill round,
white cups, listening for the train that will lumber

past pale bellies I imagine rising and falling,
warm in their beds. In that same poem, you asked,

Are bodies nothing more than epidemics
of desire? Here is what I know of desire: these

men who gaze at me as I walk past them
as though I might be the one to turn their cups

stained with dregs of coffee over, read
to them their fortunes. The eyes of the man

that night outside a gas station in Vidor, TX
when he warned me, You may not be a nigger,

but you sure could pass for one. How blue
they were, fevered with both lust and fear—

not unlike the blue of that afternoon you once
described as a sky buttoned to the neck. I want

to ask you why, when I stumbled towards
my car door, the man moved towards me, more

as if to offer an arm as he would his mother
than to wound. But I do not want to be this

strange, foreign shade asking you what it means
to be a white man moving through this world,

or why the man in Vidor let me go. In the end,
neither of us know whether he would have

twisted fistfuls of my hair in those bruised
and tattooed fingers, or whether we will always

wipe curls of straw wrappers off tables
in the settling silences of these emptying

restaurants. I do know that there are men
like you desiring to become men. That there

are still men like those who once menaced
these streets in white hoods, carried crosses,

transformed their god into crimson, amber,
gold spines of light. A body, epidemic, perhaps,

but flesh also—flesh that fills, as you
wrote, the ever widening spaces we are made

strangers to. Flesh: beaten, burned, pierced
through its sides, stroked into flame, this weary

pinfold of skin I button into a heavy coat
after untying from its waist another stained

and wrinkled apron. In winter, the sun
descends at 4:30, so I walk my way home

through the dark past street lamps flickering
on, knowing that when I get there, I will unlock

the door, and, fully clothed, push myself
under the unmade covers of my bed, stay there.

No reason not to.

Originally Published in Copper Nickel

Featured Poet for January - Tarfia Faizullah

This year I am going to try focusing on new and emerging poets rather than the established and well known. They need all the support they can get, and I'd like to think that my little blog can be of, at least a little, assistance.

The first poet of the new year is:

Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Midland, Texas by parents who had immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh. 

"My father (a doctor in private practice) often had Highlights magazine in the waiting room of his clinic," she says, "which I read from cover to cover. I also avidly read everything by Madeleine L"Engle, Cynthia Voigt, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, to name a few. I wrote as a child, both poems and short stories. I think it was reading that ultimately led me to writing. It was through that act of immersion in someone else"s attempt to describe the world that I felt a strong compulsion to do the same. I used to copy poems I had read in volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica for Kids into my journal. Later, in college, I read this quote by Gunter Kunert in Stephen Dunn"s memoir Walking Light: "That"s why I write: to bear the world as it crumbles." That struck an incredible chord with me."

- Ploughshares.

 

Her book

                   Seam,  

winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, 
is due out in March of 2014, and it is available for pre-order. 

Her poems appear in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review, Washington Square, Best New Poets 2013, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project Award, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Copper Nickel Poetry Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and Sewanee Writers' Conference, fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop and Vermont Studio Center, and other honors. 

Seam is a book that narratively and structurally relies on distance: between two continents and cultures as well as between the year of Bangladesh’s independence and its modern moment. ...

I still have no words for how I felt about a woman enduring such horror feeling sorry for me. In this way, and so many others, my time in Bangladesh made me rethink culture, victimhood, violence, and empathy. 

 - Lantern Review Blog.

How about some poetry, after all, that's why we're both here. No?

from: Interview with a Birangona

In 1972, the Bangladeshi government accorded a new visibility to the 200,000women raped during the 1971 Liberation War by lionizing them as birangonas (war heroines), though they were often ostracized by their families and social circles.

What were you doing when they came for you?

Gleaming water sweeps over
Mother’s feet. Bayonets. Teeth.

My green and yellow Eid sari
flaps damply between two palm

trees. Grandfather calls to me:
mishti maya. Girl of sweetness.

Aashi, I call back. I finish braiding
my hair, tie it tight. I twine a red string

around my thigh. That evening,
a blade sliced through string, through

skin, red on red on red. Kutta, the man
in khaki says. It is only later I realize

it is me he is calling dog. Dog. Dog.

Who was in charge at this camp? What were your days like?

All I knew was underground: bodies piled on bodies,
low moans, sweat, rot seeking out scratches on our thighs,

the makeshift tattoos he carved on our backs to mark us.
Over milk tea and butter biscuits, the commander asks

what it feels like to have dirty blood running through our
veins. There were days we wooed him, betrayed each other

for his attention—now he turns me over on burlap.
Outside, bundles of jute skim the wide river. I turn

my face away. Kutta, he says. You smell. Tell me anything
you know about the body, and I will tell you how

it must turn against itself. Now I’ve seen a Muslim
girl naked, he says. How my body became an eddy,

a blackblue swirl. Don’t cry, he says. How when the time
came for his choosing, we all gave in for tea, a mango,

overripe. Another chance to hear the river’s gray lull.

     Originally Published in Ploughshares

The Legacy of Women in the Liberation War, 40 Years On 

Learn more about the stories behind this moving poetry at The Stories We Tell. 

Ramadan Aubade
i.

Early pre-dawn mornings, a brief
          wind thumbing through coral bell
                    vine, the tea drowsy with
                             sweet.

Father in the kitchen, eating eggs quickly—
           the sun rising, pressing
the sin of eating
           onto his hands and feet.

ii.

The painted star. Its solid center,
           wet unseeing on my back—
                      my eyes opened, the star
                                  briefly
                                            spinning.

iii.

No, not another bite, I say.
           Bananas soaked in milk.
Coconuts shaved into
                                  moon-
                                              curls.

iv.

Hours on the prayer mat.
           I wanted to be sacrosanct,
                      rubbed clean, new palimpsest
folded—
           narrower and narrower threads of hunger.

v.

Later, I tried to sing myself into fire,
          but became a knife instead.
                    The center held briefly, then broke into
                              a wall of wine-red doorways.

Originally Published in Mid American Review

Aubade: Wedding

Sister, you left that one black hair
on the towel they used to dry your corpse, 
as well as one lilac dress, hanging
in the room our parents call your room, even 

though you have never lived here. If you want
to be the shade pulled over the window at dawn, 
I will still be the sister who lifted my hand, marked
your face with its palm. If absence wants a father

quiet with guilt, I will be the bride-to-be, awake
in your room the night before my wedding, breaking
open the wide-eyed dolls facing eastward, still pristine

on their shelves. Be the shade, Sister, that snaps open 
so light beads my hands, because the henna must be 
dry by dawn, rubbed away from my promised palms.

Originally Published in The Southern Review