ADEEBA SHAHID TALUKDER
ACROSS THE EAST RIVER
What is night
if not a sprawling shadow?
The split leaves,
the curve of them, slick
and warm, under this air
that lives in your crevices
and mine. How the same air
has touched both of us, laces
its fingers in ours. The bridge
is lit up. In this night of still water,
it is all there is.
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*** ** ***
BEFORE HE SINNED
After the sky was wedded
to the earth it turned
by degrees
into fire,
char and smoke.
The gods, unmoving,
watched this dawn
and lusted.
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*** ** ***
REVOLUTION
When at last
she began to burn,
he turned back
into himself,
slow as cold snaking
into a fold of cloth.
For too long
she had held his sky—
any longer,
and he would lose
himself.
So he turned
from her,
walked away
from the horizon,
from its glowing water
as the sun lay
smothered
in a pool of red.
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*** ** ***
ON COURTING CALAMITY
after N.M. Rashed
A thread
from pre-
eternity
to past time’s
end, a thread
that binds
movement
to gesture, a crow
to a narcissus.
I stretch.
My waist, this morning,
is a knot.
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*** ** ***
THE ROSE THE FLAME THE HUNTER
We are all the same woman— with silver hands
and eyes of gold, cracking the earth
softly with our petals.
All love songs are about me
and you. Men stand with fistfuls
of buds, waiting to strew them at our feet,
holy like an endless stream of water.
Sometimes they wander intoxicated
to the tavern, reciting verses
of our cruelty, clipped of their wings,
songs of exaltation and grief.
Their sorrow is beautiful,
but the rose has not learned
to move or be moved.
Friends, have you learned?
We are mirrors.
All they want is to see themselves.
All we want is to bloom.
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*** ** ***
THE BRANCH
Majnoon, his collar sewn,
returns to the city.
He scatters the petals of roses, dark
like the horizon.
In the courtyard, a child eats dust.
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*** ** ***
ON THE FERRY
how many lights are poets,
their yellow-white suns
leaning over
each wave of the river
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ADEEBA SHAHID TALUKDER
Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, forthcoming through Tupelo Press, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. A Best of the Net finalist and a Pushcart nominee, Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is a Poets House 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow.
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A Dozen Nothing 