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"The Heart, The Mind", "Crates", "We Shared Only This Earth"...by Ali Nasir

The Heart, The Mind


Often, these two will have tea together.

Turning in the sun, devouring fields of bluegrass.

I won’t lie sometimes you will be the bluegrass,

plucked with brute force and

poised at the mouth of a god.


Often, you will be swallowed.

And only in your unmaking will you be


so sweet


so

light.



Crates


Each day, you will set out to collect

grudges to hold against the world,

then lug laboriously through dusk.


You will think to protect yourself

against every ailment besides


silence, which will seep through the field of

your mind like gasoline.


You will label thousands of crates and tuck them under your synapses,

thinking they are utterly whole.


You will never be able to revel in a happiness

infected with a tinge of melancholy,


The dusted labels now

reading more like prayers than testaments to the contents inside.


You will long for anything truly even, rind and all.

You will long for a longing truly even, rind and all.

You will long for a haze so thick it could

estrange you from your

own hands.


The words following “I am—” will hold your throat hostage.

They will hold a timeless possibility

That will be shattered by “—a pig,” or worse,

nothing at all.



We Shared Only This Earth


They had been two forces present at the dawning of

my life, so naturally,

I took them to be extensions of my life, sentient beings

that came simply with the house,

always at arm’s length.

In the later years, even as my

arms grew gaunt, they could not

equip the new space between the three of us.


The first farewell

posed the most detriment to

the fickle heart squirming in the fickle body. Slowly, the apartness

accumulated enough to barricade

the tears, reduced to a shifting sheen in the eyes. The Going sipped the

inevitability out of Staying‘s palms.

The only thing we shared, the Earth, most literally. On a day

deep in summer’s pit, I truly didn’t

need them. The starkness of it hinted at a Before, but their rooms,

indistinguishable from the others,

hinted otherwise. Longing was a locket, long lost, vanished like the dead do.


It was so odd, I’ll tell you. Her eyes

surveilled mine, yes, and her mouth distorted into the shape of words, directed at

me. Two metres away, too close to be

a vision filling her absence- she was certainly there, though my mind took

her to be half a world away,

still.



All My Selves—


—coalesce to get

a good night’s sleep.

And how unfortunate,

this brotherhood in the night,

when everything looks one

and uniform anyway.




Ali Nasir is a writer from Lahore, Pakistan.


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