Jai Hamid Bashir
Elegy for the Imperialists in My Blood
Where the world entered through my scars,
white as odors of moon soaked through shoes—
I’ve held out for the dead each year to become less dead.
I ride my world in the absent canter of a self—
yet, return with just a bridle. Blessed myself,
or hardened with patience, to not darken
beyond an axis of Kali with ashes
of your relics to purify myself.
Asked with open palms and asked if love,
maybe love, was the reason you are
imprinted into my double-helix like cotton snagged
on thorns and backs of thrush. Pregnant Ma ate sliced
almonds in whole aspirations that I’d be as fair.
Your mythical gold ice of hair, small nostrils.
Light eyes of empire have not carried through since Dada married
the dark woman, all her ribs illuminated
out of her spine like a starved deer;
my family gossips that I look just like her.
Even in the case that you loved the women before me,
unwrapped out of their saris, with unwinding delicacy of opening
a box full of marionettes—
entered them with permission. Say you did love
those women, from whose riches I’ve come to be,
say you laid your muskets down and renounced. Tell me
how can I tell you about the security woman
with her yellow teeth as overplayed piano keys that pats me down
for the third time as my flight ascends into another skyline?
How an elderly white woman slapped me
across the face when I was a sweet three
after reaching for an unwrapped caramel
in a supermarket in California? I was reciting Ginsberg
around a Lahore bazaar. Calling out my own name
and a chai walla never appears. When I starve
at a cabbie joint in New York and Indians do not
recognize me, but I have the menu. Imagine the world starved
for your spices but not your spirit.
Doused in the false calm of history being just historical. The cool slang
of the past misremembered and turned
into grammar. I can’t speak to you, but let me bury you
now with dignity. Your blonde
hair grows out of me like constant orchards.
They say to not abandon
the dead. I pretend
the imperialists came for peacocks.
They wanted their iridescent eyes for buttons.
Their feathers were the texture of star wounds,
or the wings of houseflies who die in exodus outside bowls of fruit.
Come, let me bury you now
with the caramel color of my hands. Warm me
with the lie that you loved. In the afterlife
we will remain untouched.
Jai Hamid Bashir is a Pakistani-American and second-generation artist from The American Southwest. An MFA student at Columbia University in the City of New York, she recently received the Linda Corrente Memorial Prize. The winner of an Academy of American Poet’s University Prize, nominee for a Pushcart Price 2020, she also been featured in publications such as Asian American Writer’s Workshop, Palette Poetry, and Sierra Magazine. The poet has five poems forthcoming from The American Poetry Review in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue.