If They Come for Us: Poems - Softcover

Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, educator, and writer. She is the writer of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. She is a member of Dark Noise and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.

For Peshawar

december 16, 2014

Before attacking schools in Pakistan, the Taliban sends kafan, a white cloth that marks Muslim burials, as a form of psychological terror.

From the moment our babies are born

are we meant to lower them into the ground?

To dress them in white? They send flowers

before guns, thorns plucked from stem.

Every year I manage to live on this earth

I collect more questions than answers.

In my dreams, the children are still alive

at school. In my dreams they still play.

I wish them a mundane life.

Arguments with parents. Groundings.

Chasing a budding love around the playground.

Iced mango slices in the hot summer.

Lassi dripping from lips.

Fear of being unmarried. Hatred of the family

next door. Kheer at graduation. Fingers licked

with mehndi. Blisters on the back of a heel.

Loneliness in a bookstore. Gold chapals.

Red kurtas. Walking home, sun

at their backs. Searching the street

for a missing glove. Nothing glorious.

A life. Alive. I promise.

I didn’t know I needed to worry

about them

until they were gone.

My uncle gifts me his earliest memory:

a parking lot full of corpses.

No kafan to hide their eyes

no white to return them to the ground.

In all our family histories, one wrong

turn & then, death. Violence

not an over there but a memory lurking

in our blood, waiting to rise.

We know this from our nests—­

the bad men wanting to end us. Every year

we call them something new:

British. Sikhs. Hindus. Indians. Americans. Terrorists.

The dirge, our hearts, pounds vicious, as we prepare

the white linen, ready to wrap our bodies.

Partition

you’re kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a different flag. until no one remembers the road that brings you back. you’re indian until they draw a border through punjab. until the british captains spit paki as they sip your chai, add so much foam you can’t taste home. you’re seraiki until your mouth fills with english. you’re pakistani until your classmates ask what that is. then you’re indian again. or some kind of spanish. you speak a language until you don’t. until you only recognize it between your auntie’s lips. your father was fluent in four languages. you’re illiterate in the tongues of your father. your grandfather wrote persian poetry on glasses. maybe. you can’t remember. you made it up. someone lied. you’re a daughter until they bury your mother. until you’re not invited to your father’s funeral. you’re a virgin until you get too drunk. you’re muslim until you’re not a virgin. you’re pakistani until they start throwing acid. you’re muslim until it’s too dangerous. you’re safe until you’re alone. you’re american until the towers fall. until there’s a border on your back.

Kal

Allah, you gave us a language

where yesterday & tomorrow

are the same word. Kal.

A spell cast with the entire

mouth. Back of the throat

to teeth. Tomorrow means I might

have her forever. Yesterday means

I say goodbye, again.

Kal means they are the same.

I know you can bend time.

I am merely asking for what

is mine. Give me my mother for no

other reason than I deserve her.

If yesterday & tomorrow are the same

pluck the flower of my mother’s body

from the soil. Kal means I’m in the crib,

eyelashes wet as she looks over me.

Kal means I’m on the bed,

crawling away from her, my father

back from work. Kal means she’s

dancing at my wedding not-­yet come.

Kal means she’s oiling my hair

before the first day of school. Kal

means I wake to her strange voice

in the kitchen. Kal means

she’s holding my unborn baby

in her arms, helping me pick a name.