Lord,

“heaven’s not a place more a wound i make & pass through”

“We tend to repeat what hurts us, things, and ghosts of things, The actual green of summer, and summer’s half-truth. We tend to repeat ourselves.”

Clarice Lispector, too, had died with flowers

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.

Don’t rush—this road is a dead end! Why gallop toward infinity? 

I crawl slimy from a cave beneath yr heart I hiss, I spit oracles at yr front door in a language you have forgotten. I unroll the scroll of yr despair, I bind yr children with it. It is for this you love me. It is for this you seek me everywhere. Because I gave you apples out of season Because I gnaw at the boundaries of the light

to live in proximity to death is to live in the space of premonition