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by Aria Aber Again, I lay at God’s feet like a heap of tropical wilt. Begged a beginning, or a spectacular end. I wanted to be a gnat-thin thing or at least not Muslim: God came as a forest, pregnant with steel, growing her droning fury— between my eyebrows an apology itched, still and absolute. I shucked and spat into an ashtray my language. Was all I touched a deity? Khodaye ab, god of water. Then, my own hushed sex: Khodaye Kus. God quite the dealmaker, chopped all my copper hair and gave me knotted roots, a twig. Bugs suffused and were havocked in my mouth. It didn’t matter whether I inhabited a human or a tree: I remained a glob of impermanence. Plenty of me was heavy inside the earth. And parts of me were not at all: under such strain, a brain remembers its first music— Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim, I sang, and its pulse enclaved me like my first big fiction, all those finches I had drowned in the river–– Bismillah, bismillah, bismillah, I thought, and God thrust down my throat her jittering hand, until my sins came forth as guppies in an avalanche of bile. I was unspectacular as fish scales dropped on a roadside. As morning trickled the canopy, my metallic nudity was washed with cold. Beads of aloe and mint furled from my skin. I stared down at this thing I was becoming and eventually, God begot me with her saltless strings. All this time it had been wrong, the way I was beseeching–– to want the universe to pity me.  photo by Nadine Aber Aria Aber was raised in Germany, where she was born to Afghan refugees. Her debut book HARD DAMAGE won the 2018 Praire Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Narrative, POETRY Magazine, and elsewhere. |