Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn in 1980, daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants who moved to Midland, Tex., while she was a child. In 2010, she traveled to her parents’ homeland to interview survivors of systematic rape by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war for Bangladesh’s independence. The stories she collected from the birangona became the subject matter for her 2014 collection of poetry, Seam.
Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from that book. An
aubade is a song or poem about lovers parting at daybreak. Looking at how
Faizullah constructs it, I see at least three possible lines of narrative, and
I find it compelling from the title to the last line.
“Aubade Ending in the Death of a Mosquito”
—at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka
Let
me break
free of these lace-frail
lilac fingers disrobing
the black sky
from the windows of this
room, I sit helpless, waiting,
silent—sister,
because you drew from me
the coil of red twine: loneliness—
spooled inside—
once, I wanted to say one
true thing, as in, I want more
in this life,
or, the sky is hurt, a blue vessel—
we pass through each other,
like weary
sweepers haunting through glass
doors, arcing across gray floors
faint trails
of dust we leave behind—he
touches my hand, waits for me
to clutch back
while mosquitoes rise like smoke
from this cold marble floor,
from altars,
seeking the blood still humming
in our unsaved bodies—he sighs,
I make a fist,
I kill this one leaving raw
kisses raised on our bare necks—
because I woke
alone in the myth of one life, I will
myself into another—how strange,
to witness
nameless, the tangled shape
our blood makes across us,
my open palm.
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