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by Selina Mahmood “And it isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death.” — Milan Kundera too much sense you tip into chaos / too little you create more / i buried your voice and it bloomed into jamun boughs laden with laughs so heavy they drooped to tease my grandmother’s garden flooded with fire / we never would have imagined fearing departures back then / back then departures had been interims / we’d simply turn back from sleep to heated wood / all roads lead back from Sydney / on the road, the towers went up in flames / on the road, my sister forgot my mother / i discovered or created belief by ribboning temporality with desire / once the infinite regression makes its way into your psyche you’re done for / andar sai kha jata hai / i discovered or created desire by carving it out / i sought my father for the soul after he’d spent the day chiseling brains he said we had discovered or created nothing so i discovered or created nothing: either white noise in white silence or a decaying red body / a vector pointing straight up turning curving eating itself from beneath / i’ve lost so much person i eat earth to curb my hunger for white noise / i’ve lost so much person i’ve lost track of all tracks & arguments / the rains broke and beyond the charred bodies was a whole skin tucked between wall and floor / the first body i touched was a two-year-old girl’s sodomized cadaver / there was so much red i could have sworn it was the end / God can be found in everything but don’t confuse everything for God / on the road, i always remember my mother  Selina Mahmood was born in Detroit and will be serving as a Neurology Resident there. She has also lived in Lahore, NYC and Ann Arbor. She graduated with a major in history from the University of Michigan in a previous life before pursuing medicine. Her work has appeared in The Manhattanville Review, Squawk Back, Blood and Thunder—Musings on the Art of Medicine, The Conglomerate and others. She has also blogged book reviews on HuffPost. She is currently a Poetry Reader for Boulevard and Frontier Poetry. When she isn't busy diving into the brain, she's trying to swallow her way out of it. |