by Christine Sloan Stoddard
WELTSCHMERZ
(n. a feeling of melancholy and world-weariness.)
I will not open my fingers
I am afraid the bones will give way to carnage
a mess no intimate spring will fix
will a silence mean to be something more than it is?
tracing the outlines of a memory, her tears are trickling
on my two muddied feet
the cell-block has been scraped so much, o lord!
The calendar says we are two days late.
I cannot rub the stench of invisible blood from the back
of my past. I want to see snow you know.
The silence of it while sipping on lemongrass tea
in the back porch as the starlings sing to me
it will be a sunny Sunday.
I will not let the doorbell
or my bed take me.
Chasing a sliver of sunshine, the sky
will join me as we waterboard in the lily ponds
lock jawed, I will have to find the truth
in the depths of the marrow of the earth
as we unchoke its lungs from whitened lies
hungry, we will feed them kinnows
and take care of them, and brush their hair in the morning
tell them bed-time fables of vengeance and conviction
We will kill them in their sleep before dusk arrives
Fever Dream
seems like eternity when you walk on water
or the water walks on you. Your prized chest
adorned in cuckoo feathers, a confused entendre
for death. Or preservation. Can you tell
a lie a lie by only putting it into your mouth?
Metal flows into your gums. So, when you bite
you break the bone deep. But not the heart.
Not the ribcage. The breathing doesn’t turn
hasty. Heartbeat a live wire.
That one summer when it never felt like it was sunny, we drove shotgun to where the cat-eyes took us and did not stop for one red-light. It felt as if we were almost running away, from everything that chained us to our miseries. You, clad with a pair of eyes that did not remind me of you. In the back of the wagon I crouched down beside a dead tyre and secretly wished to be slow. And less afraid. And for you to have your blue eyes back so that they may remind me once again of water. And not a fire. Or burnt ash.
Can you break the addiction and not let the bodega—
wrangle you back in its belly?
(why are you throwing your language at me when I let my tongue climb the altar and hang itself till there was no adjective, no flowery noun left in its lung)
You are taking me away on my birthday how can I tell?
The sticky sweat on the nape of my neck is the only mouth that gives me answers.
And not you. Look at you. Slap the silence out of your rotten cavity so hard
even my tears freeze at the sound of impact. And caress your head in my chafed elbows
secretly wishing— closure on a dead winter night. Sleep sirens turning to festivity
regrets to mouths as they whimper thirsty to the festoons in the middle of the quaint street
The melody birthing hum. That night, I cleaved the tender meat right off the calve bone
while my two fragile hands sipped the ceramic bowl clean. We did what was
told of us. We ate to our full. I braided your hair. You put necklaces around my thinning
neck. We slept to the sound of fireworks down in the valley as the smell of fresh lavender wafted
in the thick air. We woke just on time.
We woke in front of the firing squad. And the last sound we heard was a click.
Longing
This human being is a guest
house. Every morning
a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
– Rumi.
Every morning, I remember, loss is the aftermath of a birdsong of longing–
sometimes when clouds come in their wondrous sway, drunk
I sit by the mouth of the tree line, feet deep into the brazen territory
and look for better explanations to misery. Like how love was the only sugar
our taste buds were a stranger to. Dinner tables turned to choking
on our own tongues, I wonder. My bruised knees smudged by the dying
winter grass pulling me into its wake. aah sard o rang zard o chashm tarr
Whenever there is a burial at our village,
we have to cross a stream, tiptoeing over two slippery rocks.
Intelligent design to prevent the dead from another dip.
Last December, two young boys slipped and cried
over their mother’s grave, calling out to mud for bandages.
aah-zaari, bey-qarari, dar-ba-dar is an anthem of woe so
when I buried my uncle this month, the aftermath grew
moss on the stones, almost smiling; a crooked, broken smile.
And so I stopped longing for the voice stuck in my larynx
or was it air that had died in my lungs. But there is no moss
in my throat, no resultant of ease
in a language that only
translates to small sobs. If you wake up on my bed at the dying
hours of the night, and look to your left,
you’ll see a sliver of light. It will disappear when the sun
comes up.
Do I believe the light vanishes when it fills you?
This edge to the noise is where I want to sleep
put my head down on the sloping greens
drenched in night’s tears
hands to the sky
prayers for a longing with no aftermath
no possessions snatched away like a prize
no undiscovered exit wounds so the only path
to the sky is through the mouth
native language
I will run away from the bodega you set up
at the corner of the street where you sell
amulets to bedevil the silence stoned in my closet
fleeting glimpses of a future like an ancient
movie without sounds I will sit right here near
the bodega and I will not talk about anything
after which we will torch down my bed with
kerosene and call it the best decision ever and get
tattoos made on our necks of wildflowers with mouths
tasting the sinew of honey and lie down in the compost
our lips sewn shut in a world crunched and renewed
Zain Ul Abidin Khan Alizai, he/him, is an eighteen year old Pakistani poet whose works have been published in Shallow Oceans, riggwelter, Rigorous Magazine, Counterclock Magazine, seafoam magazine among other humble places. His poems have also been a part of two Indian anthologies titled Fledglings and Bhor. He is a sucker for Stranger Things, calls Van Gogh his muse, Vuong his inspiration and his debut chapbook is in progress ever since he was 12.
Christine Sloan Stoddard is a Salvadoran-American author and interdisciplinary artist who lives in Brooklyn. Her books include Force Fed, Desert Fox by the Sea, Belladonna Magic, Water for the Cactus Woman, and other titles. She co-edited Her Plumage: An Anthology of Women’s Writings by Quail Bell Magazine for Quail Bell, the art and literary journal she founded. In 2019, she became the first-ever artist-in-residence at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House and earned her MFA from The City College of New York in Manhattan. Later that year, Christine became the artist-in-residence at Heartshare Human Services of New York, where she leads art workshops for adults with disabilities and creates artwork for display. Continuing in the direction of her poetry films like Jaguar in the Cotton Field, Done, and Marine Encounters, Christine has been selected to collaborate with poet Teri Elam for the 2020 Visible Poetry Project. 2020 will mark the release of Christine’s books Naomi & the Reckoning (Finishing Line Press) and Heaven Is A Photograph (CLASH Books).