‘Self-Portrait As Eve Contemplating Creation’ & Other Poems

I mistook honey as texture

of Allah’s mercy all those years,

thinking I didn’t need it.

Or somebody else needed it more.

I’d anticipated the discomfort

of its stickiness, convinced if I

tasted it once, it would never leave

my tongue. I was like that with love

for so long. Whatever it was I thought

I’d done wrong could never move me.

I mistook shadow for the absence

of light when it was the evidence for it.

I gripped fruits from their pulpy

centers, let you melt between my

mouth like evening. I was a girl—

Angel & a girl-child & a girl animal.

A carnivore of want.

I licked & licked the earth clean.

I wanted to efface where I fell next.

I am missing the zinger burger of my childhood and begin walking at 2AM knowing that the Karachi Fast Food and Biryani shop must be closed at this hour. I am an unaccompanied woman walking in my childhood neighborhood, hungry for a zinger burger—around me are only those who knew me as a child. That is, if I were to lose my way to vertigo, to night-blindness, to sleepwalking— there are those who would direct me home, or give me a ride, or call my father to pick me up while letting me sit in their still opened ice-cream parlor and let me choose up to two flavors of ice-cream for free to eat while I waited. The strays are here too and they come to me wagging their tails. These strays are also the strays of my childhood—but they haven’t aged a bit. And though I have—they still recognize me. And when I ask them how?—and because I am a woman in her childhood neighborhood we understand each other—they tell me that the heart remains the same. I give them the rest of my ice-cream because by now my father has arrived and I haven’t seen him in ages.

Bodies never fail to fascinate me. We have to practice three days of celibacy. At our age, that’s two years.

Head, heart, hands—the professor repeats the Ignatius principles to a group of newbies in the hall.

Though I only stop at that first one. Believe it to be all, even as my hands type otherwise, heart believes

in other things. I am fascinated by our openness to each other. The heart’s muscle as expanding

& expanding—the prophet in the cave, listening for threat, visited by Jibril instead.

Of course that is what it means to open one’s heart, to yank it out of one’s chest in broad daylight.

At the museum, there’s a ferret heart, a baboon heart, a fish heart. As if one can choose

the enormity of one’s love. As if there is a bazaar for hearts, where price is always negotiable.