After the doctors diagnosed my violences,
I guessed I’d die immortal: breaths incessant
as sunlight, hairline frail as the jagged silhouette
of an ice cube. I imagined the sizzle of oil
like another dream deferred to concrete rivers,
myself named Noor after the soft dusk, which
once wilted green into wheat fields. Sometimes,
eyes knifed against the thick gray of a textbook,
I imagined myself finding my mother floating
upon metaphors, driven wild in a river’s basin,
while the other daughters drifted to the surface,
drowned. Reconstructed survival: a hand-me-down
fashioned necessity. Curving blindly into a scythe, the river
forsook nothing and so its daughters like pearls left
undigested — self-immolation awaited in acid
before touch could scalpel them alive. My mother told
me once, of how her sisters communed with asps,
bit their breasts to depart. She spoke of the war years.
Discovering the ways a body could rewrite itself after
its becoming. All she could love: the world, the bitter
braying of old-men and dogs. Her country which never
blinked and a tumorous body which distended upon
her hands. How her father spoke of the river’s blood
which leaked into each dinner. How she ate until
her stomach engorged itself like a flea and still
her sister’s parting the leaden years stole.