POEM FOR WANT

A mirrorless story. My father’s mother’s name.
Considering to see a deer in the distance. Prayer for forgiveness, because Allah 
is most forgiving, he loves to forgive. My father’s 
pishtend. The name of a country
I may die in. Rocks in my body made

against reason, against beauty. I would allow anything at all to occur

at me. Fog and reassurance. Rest at no
revelation. Mountains slanting a page
for hours. I can’t tell you who my father is or 
say anything about the country in which
my mother lived, comes from. I’m resigned,
I’ve sat and waited for birds to appear 
in the sky. I’ve harmed no one to want
knowledge to place in my many lacks.

A SECRET IS A MISTAKE I KEEP, LIKE THE MOUNTAINS

EXISTING FOR OUR FORCED RETREAT

I was eighteen when I told a man much older
than me what I had been unable for years
to those much closer. My brother killed —
& I, to be, thereafter, sealed myself.
Within thin memory. During my delayed confession, did the lakes
we sat on undo something of me? What was moving
under us? I didn’t have a mountain nearby —
if I had, these secrets wouldn’t have left.
Like my father, I’m unable to hide how
I look by the way I speak.

MAMA, ON THE CEILING OF MY BEDROOM

when I touch my own skin to fall
asleep. In between me & God, 
intercepting the duaa that one 
day my father would love 
me like her. Witnessing rows
of red fish on my chest, five 
knives above my head. As I
forget to pray another day, 
making the rain outside hurt
my bones. Pronouncing
SWT correctly, in my own 
absence. Following the late
night binge. Noticing after 
another piercing — then nothing.
New words and new countries. 
Learning everything I would never 
tell her. A man I love from a country
that loves him. Complaining 
that I wore jeans in bed. Hearing 
me sing maybe when I’m older 
forgetting will be easy. Thinking 
of making my sister colorful rice, 
omitting the raisins. Whispering, 
you could never have been born 
in Afghanistan. Because the pain 
I caused as a newborn, because 
the doctors there. Not sleeping 
just to watch me. 

LOW FLYING PLANES

I didn’t think shaytaan needed me. But I was burning in the lack 
of my history, not of God. All the branches I wasn’t made from.
(when I say God and not Allah, is it in spite or in shame?)
an older white poet told me to say Allah in my poems when I was seventeen
Americans think of this word confessional, how would I write in it? Half of these words to my mother
never mind my father — I couldn’t 
make sound in our only language.
He’s green, left-handed, six feet tall. He peels and splays fruit for sorry
and a reason to smoke. What I know,
who died.

The low flying plane has now become my ground. My taught bell. 

Let me think of Allah, not my God. O
I was so young when I learned, beyond the mountains
with so many names in my mind,
I could never earn how to call for you.

LOVE

It was not a shame that you only saw me
in fragments. My languages missing! The birds 
chucked into ground, or as I first thought,
they might. 

How can I hold no history, no name for a country 
but volumes of violence      (it was this nomadic, this running) 

on any side? My people have a song for storks
when they return from their migration. Who are my

people? You looked at me like there was no
nest in my throat. Like I knew how
to sing. Like it was okay I had nowhere
to be.

LOW FLYING PLANES

There is a song only the birds know. People with free time 

can see what direction they move in, notice the pitch. It is
that when I thought of fog near the mountain, I thought about the rocks

in my head. The enemies of Kurds have said so — rocks in the head have made me
an animal. I’m someone who needs to be taken
care of, or I’d be left alone with the killing,

GHAZAL WITH ENEMIES

Hiding into birth, the cord had my neck. My first enemy,
I’m now much older, I learned this speech — how to address an enemy.

When my mother left me briefly as a child,
I wept. You figure you would, what? Miss? Forgo an enemy?

My father is six feet tall, his life! He’d never admit
to making Kurdistan, that mist, his enemy.

Words now flake from my mouth. Bound to break bones, my DNA — it was a mistake 
to have been named after migration. I would stay, suggest rocks over bliss: to rest with my enemies.

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

My brother killed his best friend
when he was nineteen.
I live next to a surveillance
company. There, someone watched
me repeat our word 
for father, so at night, walking
home, I wouldn’t forget
the sound.

LOW FLYING PLANES

Not at all the possibility of language                 it existed as a break
in the sky first thought of the sound of trains entering me but droning
it belonged to a plane. Language wasn’t so ceremonial anymore I forgot the storks
that forgiveness would decide my face              it applied to my taught belief: beyond the mountains
not mine I couldn’t be so strong.

THE MYSTERY

Because of my life’s refusal
to be categorized by a bomb.
Simple the words that could not be,
this language not mine. Now the memory unlike beginning, I was searching myself for 
an identity.
In a drawer near the bathroom, among small bottles of perfume oil,

my father kept keychains of Saddam.

I was never supposed to learn Kurdistan.

I was meant to a stone, how could I
reveal my own name.