my body is the house of chronos
my body is the house of chronos,
where the hours are unanchored and
memories are bottle-ships
drifting through a sea of
glittering crumbled mirror
dusts.
mythic deaths
stained of dripping
garnet stones of blood.
the moonbeam is sliced
with the edge of an
angel’s dagger
and woven into
the shroud which will
adorn a god’s remains.
cha patta rong (tea colored)
maa
i am your child born from
crumbling brown tea leaves
over-steeped in your womb
i fell from your eden
of bitter brew
and burned hue
carrying the tinted sin
in every pore of my skin
dehothottho (truth in the body)
i am dyed in grandfather’s spirit
dusty bronze skin
earthen disposition
of rural heart
and flower faith
Nodia (undivided)
perhaps i spent my days as some sprig of leaf
or flower there in the distant past,
plucked one morning,
and offered at the feet of god to be reborn,
in the poro jonom, as they say,
a radha longing to understand biraha
the meaning of separation and partition.
* * *
Nazia Islam is a master’s student studying religion with a concentration in interdisciplinary studies at a seminary in California. She is using poetry to reconnect with her Bengali folk heritage and to externalize everything she has absorbed and internalized growing up in communities outside of her own ethnic and religious ones. Some of her visual poetry can be found on Instagram, and she writes at https://missnaziaislam.wordpress.com/, where three of these poems originally appeared.
