rest in peace

To love greater than being insecure—-
to skinny dipping, alopecia or curly hair, Allah.
The list is endless today. I couldn’t fly in my dreams
because I was laying in my bed.
My best friend’s snort laughs from the night before
have echoed into tortuous cries this morning,
and I purge with her as if fears are foreign to our bodies.
I say, “Release. You will never run out.”
Love is the last thing to ration.
But I tire easily in Sukhasana,
shaking to the gamble of her possible
posthumous birth and also my second cup of coffee.
There is hope that my mom’s abdominal CT scans are interpreted
as just fat,
and this book’s trope of “in another lifetime”
makes me fall to my knees to pray for
and write an ode to:
submission, the sun’s sanctuary, my shrine,
your gone brother, her father, and both of mine,
a white picket fence overseas built like child’s play
around light pink bricks on a backdrop of olive trees,
more lists, blind trust, and Schrödinger’s cat;
because are we alive if we aren’t loved?

kilim/ by design

Late nights— and still, I awake early to tweet with the birds. 

I’ve brewed coffee as cold as my living room floor and it’s so loud on this side of town, but I turn off my phone and sit on my yoga mat anyway. 

My mat’s not as colorful as the rugs that I remember to be scattered throughout my family’s house. The ones where I’d sit and pray. Really, I’d sit and gaze at the patterns of the silk embroidery and I’d trace circles with my fingers and chase thoughts in my head.

All while I listened to the deafening sound of a ticking wall clock.

I wonder about the weaver overseas whose labor knows not of the corporate greed that exists on the other side of the world, but knows all too well how her hands grew weary from stretching towards heaven. 

I wonder if she puts her trust elsewhere, finding more money than beauty in the struggle. And so she cuts the rug off of the loom so that the warped threads just dangle carelessly like ornaments. 

Or maybe she thinks of me and future generations when she meticulously loops two strands of wool together right before she ties them into one tight knot.

Above all else, I bet that she’s simply too tired to riot. So she prays that by design, a devoted fidgeter like me will pull the loose ends without unraveling her handmade tassels.

I know that the effects of my selfish decisions will someday materialize. I may not have it in me to stop buying new Nikes for my feet and start paying exploited workers what is rightfully owed to them by spending my money more mindfully.

Only when my fingers reach the cross stitches where delicacy meets the sharp edges of the rug’s binding do I recognize the distractions of meditation.

After all these years, I am still jittery and think too far into things to ever sit still.  But, despite my circular thoughts going off on a tangent--- I still find good news: my couch has been delivered to my door today, and in exchange, my money has landed in good hands. 

goosebumps

I can’t see it and I can feel it.

wind and love.

I let it come, I let it be, I let it go.

It feels right to let it move me.

the leaves all run far from the trees

and the hairs on my legs,

they rise when you text.