[Digital Poetics 4.6] Two Poems by Alycia Pirmohamed
Anupa Gardner, Water, Medium – Cyanotype, Instagram: anupa.gardner
Website: http://www.anupagardner.com/
Titration toward naming my emotions
I walk into a field note.
The test area slides ancestral dreams off my skin—
in other words, I plant my dark matter into a vase
of flowers that was arranged without me in mind.
My body feels like a disagreement
untethered and floating in the nearby stream.
Next to me are the green symbols of some emotion
I can’t name and this, I realise, makes me a failed poet.
Meanwhile, inherited memory reigns in my ambition
to become a science, a stem practice
inundated with the names of men. [my anatomy
pulls apart] What do you call a scattering self
-love? I wonder why I ever wanted to end up here
and yet, still marvel at how I ever did.
Now, I walk through ecopoems to observe
if the wind will ever recognise my body’s ibid.
I collect all of this data into the leaky archive.
[it is violent to be erased] According to history
there were no statistically relevant faces.
Contiguousness laughter
My mother’s laugh becomes my laugh
and I hear it skitter across the ocean
before it lodges in my throat.
Somewhere under the liquescent surface
is the incident that beckoned me
into my bodily strangeness, and yes,
I do what I can to forget that memory.
Instead, I slip into my adjacency over
long decades of looking at art
from behind a glass barrier.
Even now the waterline wavers
when I come closer,
as if the scene before me is a painting
en plein air, not to be touched
and especially not to be affixed to this skin.
I ease myself around the frame,
just out of reach of whatever trauma
has decided to follow me here,
a great lineage spanning
its neon heartache across the great sea.
Species stream into one another,
emerging from the water
with different, slick, creamy heads.
And god, who would even recognise me now,
covered in flecks of oily paint
and unwilling to wash off
these stuck on fibres of assimilation.
I have said it before:
‘a landscape changes a body’ and I know
a body changes a landscape too.
Now all I can think about
is how a nation replaces, slowly,
every fragment of the self
I once attempted to love
until she sinks into
its most tolerable peripheries.
I find myself at border after border,
and when I look in,
I see a girl variegated with the hues
of my mother’s childhood
in a city I have only seen once
but which has certainly changed since.
*
Alycia Pirmohamed is a writer and academic. She is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water.
*
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
