Seed
I turned twenty-five and it was summer.
I thought my vocabulary
for death had stopped growing
but it bloomed a deluge of dandelions
in my room. The war we had
thought would end, did not end.
I visited the distant family
in a dream at dawn.
They handed me plates of seeds,
foreign to the home garden.
My brain fully developed,
I wrote conversations
long and red—pages without dialogue
television static noise, beautiful
blurred photos. I kept them
in the tin box I house my tears
in that used to house keys before
it housed needles: a South Asian ritual.
Shame had carried my life,
and I was still ashamed.
As an unfilial daughter,
a bitter gourd,
I left my job
to plant flowers long and red.
Later, from my kitchen window,
I watched the trees fall
into shadows, grief
rolling their lips inward.
Hafsa Zulfiqar is a poet from Pakistan and an incoming MFA student at Cornell University. Her work, which has received the WNDB Walter Grant, three Best of the Net nominations, and a Pushcart nomination, explores brown identity, dreams, language, liminality, and above all the notion of inheritance; it can be found or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, swamp pink, The Offing, Up the Staircase Quarterly, AAWW: The Margins, South Dakota Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, & elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @HafsaZUnar and Instagram @vibingwithabook.
