ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس is a poet and artist identifying as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her interdisciplinary work places poetry at its center and delves into paint, film, sound, theater, performance, and collaboration with the intention of breaking conventional ideas of linear language, form, and genre to materialize a space of belonging for marginalia and their narratives. Her work strongly revolves around issues of belonging and dislocation, G/god and spirituality, and beauty::cruelty while possessing a strong agency for decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure practices. She edits poetry at The Margins and has received endorsements from Art Omi, Asian American Writers Workshop, Kundiman, Brooklyn Poets, UNESCO, Millay Colony For The Arts and elsewhere. Her work has been published extensively, including Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The Nation, Poets.org and others. Her first book of poems, Coining A Wishing Tower, won the Broken River Prize and was an Indies Award Finalist. Originally from Lahore, Pakistan, she is based in New York City.
Gyozas
The sky is so orange.
I eat the orange of the sky.
I want to say I think of you often but its perseverance against death.
In truth, I think of you all the time.
Where are you? What are you eating? Who is talking to you?
Why is it not me?
I want to feed you my fifth meal of the day: trader joe’s gyozas and mushrooms. All boiled.
I have been going to the gym but my body still looks like disjointed alphabets.
Gibberish.
I want to look like you.
Each and every muscle group defined.
Wearing an unending glow that keeps me up all night.
I am not strong.
I cannot conquer you.
On Instagram, this is your second Hyrox. Shirtless. Abs so shiny.
You are so strong.
You conquer me.
Like a country to another country until it becomes no country.
But Empire.
I am lost in your Empire.
Watching Country bomb country on the screen of my phone from the floor mattress in my friend’s room in Philly.
A refugee.
My friend calls me over the phone to her mother.
In my new terminology, I buy a boba and sit under the fracturing shadow of a Mulberry tree.
I sigh out an orange sunset. It runs to a horizon.
I also want to have a horizon.
I also want to do this Hyrox thingy.
Have visible muscle groups. Pecs, flex, strength.
Become an Empress in your Empire with tender alphabets.
I am young so the future is long.
I hope I stay forever young. If not, younger.
Eating hundreds of gyozas and peeling millions of oranges.
Feeding open-mouthed chuckling children I will birth.
With you.
The future still has some hope.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
