Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Voices from the fringes: Witness my open palm

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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