but language isn’t nature or nurture unless it’s both. so i watch the edge of my smoky mouth like you watch the rim of a manhole cover. and i know it, we’re stink-marrow hidden from the sun so grubby crusts fall out of our faces and we don’t just curl them into a smile. everything’s abrasive but meet me on the other side. if it’s a long day and my mother responds, haan or haanji, or even kya, i still read it love. the syllables strict and every white friend hears it and wonders if i’m in trouble so they’re no longer allowed in my house. when my mother could have settled her scarf into evasion, she spoke me affirmation clear. her tongue was decked in orange flowers, families dressed in red dancing into a banquet. so i say sacred instrument, but again, everything translates as severity if you don’t know the music. i take the wicked away. leave my mother to the comfort of her sisters across the ocean. so on the phone, it’s only shout. all the right things are exhausted by the tongue. [kiss the ground in the gao where i was born] [tell our father i’m sorry for leaving] [i wish we were children and holding hands in Rawalpindi] [smell jasmine for me] [smell jasmine for me] [smell jasmine for me again] [we were one bush and now we’re two] [vine yourself across the big water] [be a part of me again please] my mother can’t stomach saying any of it so there’s just an increase in volume, pushing the phone harder against her ear, shouting salaam louder with each sister’s name. so out rolls one for guddi & one for tahira & one for wajiha & one for sahira & one for asra. and when she calls me, blood is blood and i hear her well. here’s a shout even on the same soil and, again, they siren into homeland, call it security. so i assure them and assure them, but a monster is a monster when the mother tongue is evil. so i spare my mother her voice and never let them hear her sermon me into love-shuffle again. tomorrow, she sends me a million good letters. she writes the english painful and, of course, critiques comes barreling from the same mouths. they finger wag, they grammar, but still hold my name in their mouths like a stone for revolt. so when it’s spit, i hold it in my hand. i transfer it from one hand to the other. this time, i let them know she made me, so if every move she makes is violence, then let me be a war. let me give her an accolade every morning. and when we learn that every intonation is correct, we spin our language into the ceiling of the room. we never pay attention to a bright eye again. we love one another in the wrong tone and the right country is discovered in this house, where all my coats soak up the smell of food. and every time i pass an old friend, too slick with surveillance to know me still, i make sure to meet them by the neck just long enough for my garment to make them wince.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.