Tag: The Adirondack Review

“After a deadly aerial engagement, a cup of tea” by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

April 16th, 2019

Past the news of war, you sleep in a litter of cacophony
knowing the dead will forever bind their miasma to your hair

knot their shrouds to every hook in the house,
hem the sound of sirens to your head

Between tonight’s brocade sky, inked textile of tomorrow,
and tomorrow, there will be an hour of war, creeping like a reptile

across the fields where two countries grow rice with their backs
to each other and fly kites this time of the year to welcome spring

The sort of night an emperor could create from the shudder of mortality
a marble mausoleum to house his love after death— moonbeams

sewing the lips of loss, light swirling through filigrees, carved tulips and fruit buds,
turning time to flesh — it is early spring, you too feel a tingle in your fingertips,

tremble a moment like a Shalimar cypress, but the masonry of your body
is recalled when warplanes approach, when all around you are loved ones

asleep, and what the newscasters will later call aerial engagement
has been the chase all along— the flute song in your dream chased

by steam engines, swooped up by MiG-21s, chased by surface-to-air missiles
The air as sharp, the trees as majestic this side of the border, the pilot

of the downed plane asks hysterically which country he is in. Which way
should he run? As a prisoner of war, he is recorded saying, between sips

of tea, the officers of the Pakistani Army are thorough gentlemen.
He is nervous. The cup he holds is Raj-white, with a pale green bough,

vaguely Mughal in its vegetal flourish. The temperature in Islamabad is 11 degrees
Celsius, in Delhi it is 16. Yellow trumpet daffodils are blooming. It is early spring.

After a deadly aerial engagement, a cup of tea is © Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Read more here: A Glass of Tea, a View of the Atlas by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of poetry collections Kohl, Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. Her latest work, Ghazal Cosmopolitan has been praised by poet Marilyn Hacker as “a marvelous interweaving of poetry, scholarship, literary criticism and memoir.” Winner of the San Diego Book Award for poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize and multiple Pushcart nominations. Zeest Hashmi’s poetry has been translated into Spanish and Urdu, and has appeared in anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in Prairie Schooner, World Literature Today, Mudlark, Vallum, POEM, The Adirondack Review, Spillway, Wasafiri, Asymptote and McSweeney’s latest anthology In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth. She has taught in the MFA program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence and her work has been included in the Language Arts curriculum for grades 7-12 (Asian American and Pacific Islander women poets) as well as college courses in Creative Writing and the Humanities.

“Considering Their Pale Faces” and other poems by Erin Wilson

March 23rd, 2019

Seed

tōgarashi / omoikonasaji / mono no tane
the red pepper / I do not belittle / seedlings
~ Bashō

I keep a chestnut
in the breast pocket of my secondhand leather jacket.
When I picked it I thought of (I don’t know why) my mother.

The last time my first husband and I made love
I knew my womb, because of my mind, was tipped at such an angle
that no seed would germinate there.

This is also a true story.
Our children and I collected acorns to use for a project we had not yet imagined.
They exploded into weevil larvae all over the floor.

A Letter to My Ex Concerning Houseleeks

I retrieve the hens and chicks,
reminiscent of farms,
from my sister’s yard

and press them to the dirt
in the small half-circle
we dig in our own yard

and then leave them there
to grow and separate

The Mother

The last bladder is emptied,
the last gleek shot into the sink,
the last struggling out of and into,
the last — somewhat grooming,
the last sandwich flogged to its plastic compartment,
the last backpack retrieved from the floor,
the last gangly stumbling,
the last repeated good day utterance, love you, etc.,
the last kicking of the front door.

The mother is alone.
The house stands still for a moment
in its terrible shock of silence.
Then shakes off its cold blanket.
The mother leans into herself like tilted kindling,
a neanderthal, or philosopher returned to her cave.
She begins to make the fire.
It doesn’t matter what she makes the fire with.
The mother burns.

Considering Their Pale Faces

Fact: the manageable size of the baby paradise rose, with pinkish-lavender 1 - 1 1/2" blooms, offers
a small garden big potential.

Experiential: we planted a few along the border of the garden we created with the edge of a shovel
outside the kitchen window, when we bought the family home.

Fact: even miniature roses are susceptible to the same plagues as their larger cousins.

Experiential: while you children toddled about, slipping happily in leaf rot, then swung on the tire
swing, or later, hammered in the tree fort, I leaned toward the tiny leaves and scraped fat rose slugs
into a tin can, or sometimes brazenly squashed them with a thumb nail.

Fact: for years the paradise rose struggled, and eventually, I left your father.

Erin Wilson has contributed poems to The Adirondack Review, San Pedro River Review, Split Rock Review, and Minola Review, with work forthcoming from The American Journal of Poetry, Juked and Kestrel. She lives and writes in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.