I worry that my friends will misunderstand my silence as a lack of love, or interest, instead of a tent city built for my own mind, I worry I can no longer pretend enough to get through another year of pretending I know that I understand time, though I can see my own hands; sometimes, I worry over how to dress in a world where a white woman wearing a scarf over her head is assumed to be cold, whereas with my head cloaked, I am an immediate symbol of a war folks have been fighting eons-deep before I was born, a meteor.
Copyright © 2018 by Tarfia Faizullah. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 10, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Like streetlights
still lit
past dawn,
the dead
stare at us
from the framed
photographs.
You may say otherwise,
but there they are,
still here
traveling
continuously
backwards
without a sound
further and further
into the past.
From Astoria by Malena Möling © 2006 Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.