Alternate lives
I have this image of missing snow.
It keeps appearing in the greens of Planet Earth.
In the tropics. In the islands. In the crevice of Equator.
I was born. Not crying.
And without hair. Yellowing.
Breathing bareness. Possessed by Spirit or Condition.
I became a separate location outside of my mother’s womb.
A bunch of coordines to miscalculate departures at airports.
But I broke this ether. What have I done?
I only wanted to leave for a bit.
With a promise of return. But the world changed me.
Made me more woman than my country could afford.
I am lucky.
Everyone tells me. Going anywhere.
Doing anything.
Their palms heavied with lifelines
carrying tribes of belonging
whereas mine is an emptying manuscript begging to be more.
You were not supposed to live.
My mother says to me. Touching my hair in awe. Curls upon curls.
Flowing like a dented river with split ends.
Who are you?
Where did you come from?
It’s midnight.
She is building a house in the desert.
Where she once broke her front tooth in the dried up Sutlej River.
It was some summer.
There were mangoes.
Buffaloes with their own names. Robust fields of agricultural lonesome.
Where her shadow would disappear for months.
I want to give her half of my life.
I want us to die at the same time in the same crevice.
I want us both to empty our lungs in a fruiting forest full of snow.
I only have a few more years left of us.
Yet I still write poems.
At the Amtrak station. At Barnes and Nobles. At the John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Only when I sleep, I become my mother.
Hardly 30. Crying. Terrified. In the E.R.
Giving birth. To me.
Me!
God!
What have I done?
I only wanted her to live.
A little like me.
Without me.
Ayesha Raees (عائشہ رئیس) is a poet and artist who identifies as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of belonging and dislocation, G/god and spirituality, and beauty::cruelty while possessing a strong agency for decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure practices. She edits poetry at The Margins and has been endorsed by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, UNESCO, and others. Her first book, Coining a Wishing Tower, won the Broken River Prize. She is based in New York City and Lahore, Pakistan (and many other unsettled spaces).
