I want things I do not deserve. how awful to be choked by your own idle and uncertain hands? Maybe that is the punishment: longing with no reciprocity. it is impossible to know the dead the way I need to-- so take me to Medina! I just want to taste it for a moment, (what … Continue reading poetry// distance(d)
poetry// origin stories
Before everything else, I am water. (I think) The Thames was nice and so was the Schuylkill, The Potomac too, I think. I remember the Nile. The Great Lakes. The Chesapeake Bay Like when my uncle joined our field trip and sat in a boat full of small Muslim children and they had never been … Continue reading poetry// origin stories
prose// sleep songs and other things
Time has stretched over the frame of my story like the skin of a large animal, a cloak, a worn in quilt. Somethings are not granted that kind of elasticity: food, sleep, the brief transition from summer to winter where it is cool and light and the air smells like it rained but it didn’t. … Continue reading prose// sleep songs and other things
prose// things i have learned to write and never say
I remember London. I think I was the first student in a long time to go to London and not go to Paris. Sometimes I wish I had gone to the Mona Lisa. See if she looked anything like me. Namesakes are funny. People tell me, oh, I know a Mona, or oh my wife’s … Continue reading prose// things i have learned to write and never say
prose// why i need water. often.
The thing is, I don't really know what I'm doing. They say the Sunnah is a blue print for how to live your life but there's nothing in there about how to deal with vitriol on social media, how to manage panic attacks, how to not fail your intro philosophy course senior year. Sure, there's … Continue reading prose// why i need water. often.
poetry// to know mortality in theory but to be in a body designed to reject it in actuality and why that always leads me back to God which I suppose *is* the entire point.
i wait for God here between the night and the rest of all things i know. i teach myself not to ever say my own name without folding in God does not arrive because that’s just not how it works. and i learned that. but still i struggle to teach my bones submission without fracturing. … Continue reading poetry// to know mortality in theory but to be in a body designed to reject it in actuality and why that always leads me back to God which I suppose *is* the entire point.
poetry// anxious mourning at the bank of my own river
don't you see me? thin fleshed and flickering bones i could have sworn i remembered you placing the bulb in the cartilage pressing wire circuits in my veins / can’t you see me now after you placed me here all funny looking and cracked like an old window? the rest of them have opacity stretched over their frames they … Continue reading poetry// anxious mourning at the bank of my own river
prose// volume
There are many things in life you cannot rehearse for. I know this, of course, at an intellectual level. But still yet, well, I rehearse nearly everything. The conversation before a meeting, the smile I will grace at the event that evening, the conversation I want to have with my father the next day. I … Continue reading prose// volume
prose// the worst thing I ever did
Sometimes I wish I could build a bonfire for my phone and my computer, book the earliest flight to the middle of nowhere, and live there forever after. I am too sensitive for my own good I think. I hold too much, take to many things personally, walk through the world getting bruised my too … Continue reading prose// the worst thing I ever did
prose// the cost of growth
There is something else beyond nostalgia that accompanies me whenever Facebook recommends a memory. You know, where they show you what you wrote on this exact day maybe a year ago or even more? I am in that phase of life where things happen so quickly sometimes you forget just how much you have grown, … Continue reading prose// the cost of growth
