Ruminations on a Fallen Star, Not Yet Fallen by AzizrianDaoXrak, literature
Literature
Ruminations on a Fallen Star, Not Yet Fallen
A priori:
Though I am not in love yet, I will be.
I remember how our eyes will meet;
you will see the green stars in my eyes for what they are.
I am afraid.
1. I am star-crossed, tattooed and traversed;
my clumsy limbs build a bridge of my belly
for the constellations to write their paths onto my pounding heart.
Some days these star charts are a chain link fence across my body
and on others—I can trace your name in the lines between my stars,
not the name you bear now but the true one I have always known,
the one that is for me.
2. Nostalgia is always poetic, but the blood memories
are harder to pinpoint; they do not catch like b
I never noticed the way ash looks like feathers.
I become aware of the shores where my body
folds to meet itself, doubles over so that my hair
seems to grow like roots into the ground
keeping me from ever lifting my head again.
Of all the things she told me, she missed this one:
what to do with the ashes.
Hers is a dead bird heart—
grey-haired and grey-feathered.
She is paler than she has any right to be,
ashen—
But her eyes are open, and she can see the sky
where a roof once was.
Sijo for the Snake I Am and the Mouse I Will Be by AzizrianDaoXrak, literature
Literature
Sijo for the Snake I Am and the Mouse I Will Be
By noon, I’ve forgotten how to breathe; so to learn again I glide,
bend but do not break grass blade backs to watch him work, feel my girlhood
sloughed like a snakeskin in the reeds, see my womanhood like a mouse.
Simón Bolívar found you como una Flor de Mayo.
I know that in your swelling city heart
you long por el mar, por la sal del mar,
but instead you straddle the roads,
hunker down over your landscape and breathe
your car fumes, inspiras las fumas como sombras,
espiras tranquilidad inquieta.
Colombia, madre, you have become
bloated in your old age, have grown your
ankles, pálidos e inflamados;
you should have been a sea lion,
morena y rapida y a la cresta como la espuma.
Mi alma, I will bring you the sea salt to run through your hair,
diamonds with which to crown your mane.
i. As a child, confronting giants.
I take the pine tree as my totem,
learn to love the nakedness of its nether-regions
and its northerly fibers stretched and waiting
for the weft to its warp.
Girlhood is still a part of me as the
learning what I am. In the end,
I haven't climbed a tree in a long time;
I am small, and scared, and ringed round with walls,
and I beg the moon to teach me
to use my pine trees as a ladder.
ii. In the way only young love can.
You, sir
you are pine chips, and I carry you
like a fetish in my mind.
You are the first vampiric sweetness
to suck the breath from my body:
unknowing, the feeling of ye
Divination as a Means of Finding a Way Back by AzizrianDaoXrak, literature
Literature
Divination as a Means of Finding a Way Back
1. I say nothing I am thinking.
For twelve years I have wanted
to do exactly this, but suddenly
pronouncing my own name calls up
the question of who it belongs to
in the same breath Like
Solomon I was born a singer
but in the wrong key and my
chords will not carry me, will not
summon the wolves to me only
packs of hungry dogs
stupid with domestication
but nearly feral And like
a hungry ghost I have learned
not to speak against those
who will give me food
2. A sketch of myself.
He says I must have been born
in the wrong culture, he says. I got a taste of
the crackling heat here, heat to drive you crazy,
and sud
I Have No Names for all My Teacup Babes by AzizrianDaoXrak, literature
Literature
I Have No Names for all My Teacup Babes
I feel always like I am starting over.
As a magpie I gather trinkets under my pillow,
bay leaves and bags of herbs to bring the next lover to me,
to call the next dream-face forwarda picture
painted in the tea leaves.
But truth be told the start-again
is never clean, is never gentle,
and the sweat of all that labour
is a fire on my skin, telling me
I will never resist its wind-cry.
The moon comes when I call, to help me;
midwife, she is, and she carries into being my new selves
like the babes they are, teaches them to
fill long footsteps like hers.
Truth be told, I tire of the destiny
I was given onceI am a teacup
You've Been Looking at Virtues, All Wrong by AzizrianDaoXrak, literature
Literature
You've Been Looking at Virtues, All Wrong
You've Been Looking at the Virtues of Child, Man, and Woman All Wrong
In the end we're all myths, hermaphroditic deities.
Our names are the most real things about us.
i. My mother named me for the Virgin
and I carry her legacy in my blood
she is my spirit animal; the creature
who crawled first across the placenta line
outside my home. In truth, I imagine all