Elsewhere

By Alycia Pirmohamed

She did not know the shape of
this country—            wide         darkjagged
 
bend in the river, rock elm withering,
everything withering
 
into unfamiliar dark, needled forest.
She was searching for the water and the water

was a heartache tongued by wild deer.

In northern Alberta, she was a line of crow
edging into the unknown boreal,
 
a woman caught between fennels of a dream
and long mouths of birch.
 
Even the key of her body— 
               jaggedlong          gentledark— 
 
could not unlock this landscape.
 
Sometimes there is a fog thick enough
to hide the trees
 
and she imagines this country unwithers,
​becomes a different land,
 
where her body is shaped like the river
and the river
                          is shaped like belonging.

---

On My Tongue

By Alycia Pirmohamed

Bismillah is my first memory.
 
I became a bird in the Qur’an
at hardly eight years old.
 
I opened the dark green cover
and revealed the slippery
 
two hearts: Arabic
and its English translation.
 
On Saturdays, I learned to repeat
passages in Arabic,
 
to recite the Qur’an
in its truest language— 
 
otherwise are the locusts
really locusts?
 
I read and read, and yet
I struggled to recite in Arabic.
 
This was not a problem
with my memory.
 
I learned in a week how
to recite the first verse in English.
 
Sometimes I think every Qur’an
has a dark green cover.
 
Sometimes I think I still
become a bird
 
when, in my mind, I remember
Bismillah, ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim.
 
This must be the reason I
​continue to love.
 
On my tongue, there is
a short-horned grasshopper.
 
Bismillah, I reach for you again.

---

First Language

By Alycia Pirmohamed

Tell me, what is it like to sink into the earth,
to make a home of it?
 
To put down roots and flower?
 
                    Today, I am without language.
 
This is the kind of forgetting that unfolds itself
into a hundred blank pages,
 
unbound, spineless.
 
The kind of forgetting that haunts a body,
its ghostliness
 
one long, grey tendril that curls sharply into the sky.
 
Tell me, what is it like to finally
​withdraw the unused tongue,
 
                    and kneel beneath the muted moon.

---

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland, where she is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. She was the winner of the 2018 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest in poetry, and her forthcoming chapbook, Faces that Fled the Wind, was selected for the 2018 BOAAT Press Chapbook Prize. Alycia's work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Poetry Book Society. She received an MFA from the University of Oregon.