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by Mehnaz Sahibzada
She drinks her tea with kidneys,
liver, and spleen.
Some days I mistake her for a
hungry wolfdog. A
wound forms the day she speaks
with her claws.
It is twelve minutes past sunrise,
and soon the heat
will twist into an arrow that
pierces my heart.
She breaks my skull with her
easy, furtive glances,
drinks me for breakfast before
I can speak. Her
tongue is lined with blades, and
her bites, just like
her nature, uncouth. I fold
my anger into
a butterfly, but she calls it a
parasite. I sift
the sugar with calm hands,
but she tears at
my flesh. And in a city that waits
a long plane ride
away, sits a man who sometimes
kisses, sometimes
curses, my picture. I remember
the car ride through
Lahore that changed everything.
I spoke like an
infidel in a mosque, and he
called me an
Amreekan, a disloyal
westerner, with
my piles of radical books. I
loved novels with
strange titles, but his fangs grew
whiter just like
hers. Now when I think back to
the years that
first divided us, I see my head
getting slammed.
I am guilty of chanting in
the forest. I
have wailed like a cub after
howling my
secrets to a tree. I almost
kissed a
grasshopper once by a river
because he
had kind eyes. Solitude is less
a swamp and
more a cloud where tempers
gently flare.
How does a baby balloon into
a wolf so fierce
it fails to hear its own whining?
She drinks
her tea with kidneys, liver,
and spleen.
I confess all my fears
to a thorny
rose, and the rose blooms
into a wasp,
which stings my wrist with
such wrath
I suddenly see that the
only way
it knows how to cope
with what it’s
feeling, is to break someone’s skin
without asking.
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Mehnaz Sahibzada is a 2022 Jack Hazard Fellow in fiction writing. Her writing has appeared in Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen, Jaggery, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, My Gothic Romance, was published in 2019 by Finishing Line Press. She is currently at work on her first novel, Jaani, set in post-partition Pakistan. For inquiries, contact Mehnaz through her website at www.poetmehnaz.com