Sheikha A.

​Cinnamon

A hand extends out a window to waiting birds every morning; the clouds haven’t parted and the fall of promised rain is in(di)visible. Air flips and whirrs around shed feathers, gliding further up before their resilient fall. Mornings in a desert haggle with clouds imbued by seed to make it rain / salt insemination / pervasion of light in holy shadows / hybrid tree-monks / ropes of bramble-wisteria. It isn’t spring yet – light is deafening in graves. His cosmos was always elusive / genetic regenerative loop / he was as what he had been sowed. We were chaotic comets tremoring his orbit; rousing mystical tales he buried into ancestral abyss / we didn’t know for what he lived. He would say the potion tasted bitter yet his blood we forced to seed on infusions. He never complained more than he should (have) – if only. Light shatters over sky, and in prophetic cue the hand recedes. He had begun mapping escape / no longer a need for potions / metal beds / luminous halos graphing organs / printed headers scripting presumptions / no more of no less / only tranquil timely finality of rain. More graves now neighbour his. Air seeded; cinnamon-stained palate weaned free of lingering residue / slow simmering bitterness resting on dwindling heat / eyes close as lips purse opening again to different light. We look to the fourth sky, deeper into the abyss where stars dispel dervish dust. There never is permanent absence – he is white pearl among feathers – sleep does not snatch his breathing like the pull of a cruising meteor through gravity’s lungs. Faraway stairway hyper-zooms to sleeping feet nudging them awake; clutter of light arranges into neat rows. The promise of the hand to birds no longer seeking flight. 
 
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Pastiche

Peer keenly into their mouths – the Nine of Cups – and find pairs of cataract eyes resembling closed gills. You were promised a fish in each – myth of luck: the longer they spun, the further you went. Instead, you burnt a candle over the waters, dribbled wax into their ears, prod them out, and scaled them clean to use as runes on skin-grazed parchment. Open your eyes – within this dream – crawl backwards from the hand beckoning you into a cave. Shun your sight from the glimmer of roe-black stones – glowing masses of death stares. You will be dragged in by your ears, sprayed with sweet breath of lotuses and shown an open chest of glorious pillage you would assume remember seeing hung on Mughal doors. The curtains on those doors were skins – silky gossamer cries of sheared transparency – and they were hung with intent. Now bend closer over the mouths of the Nine of Cups – don’t wake up just yet – there is more to see: you raking your hair to bind your loosened ribs. Wake up, only just slightly, touch your ears to see if you can still feel them. Your eyes are on fire – red encrusted black geodes – curtains wailing in the breeze, melted lotus leaking down your palms. You are now fully awake, limbs dangling by your side, your roving retinas lock on an image: a woman watching from the shadows; her pale lithe fingers cupping your closed palms, pointing you to a lone house by a deep-set brimming moor, a whistling pond close to the stoop, the water bubbling up stiff jaundiced fish. You feel your ribs dropping into your belly – you weren’t promised for any of this to make sense – your want for a wish to be fulfilled, and you having whispered this into existence – 

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Liquid Ode

Time spills over mountains – peaked aplomb of infallible grace – and our visions crane from vertigo. Floaters in our eyes remind us of folded silk: we will not crease under descent, but when moon and sun conspire light in unreachable corners and all of sleep brims to eternal awake, the hours will move without stirring our stillness. There is beauty in the way we have been lapsed – st(r)uck; aging like terns in paralytic flight over inexhaustible seas. We are almost like in a painting, submerged in capsule while mountains around us grow feet. Mountains are known to be slow, nailing grounds from changing, holding both ends of elasticity until they spill their centres, purge steam to melt the world to be one with the wind; every thing of mobility pulses and withers in cycles of new life. Time weeds into full habitat, yet nothing moves despite movement, but there is us: pinned to colossal tenebris, concentric silhouettes older than mirrors, migrating syllables locked inside our own skin; we flow without ripples, pressing talisman into palms of estranged lands, promising futures that cannot be measured. When we look at you with stories of us reflecting in our silence, be knowing to we being abode to those trapped in between. 
 
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Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her work appears in a variety of literary venues, both print and online, including several anthologies by different presses. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Vietnamese, Greek, Arabic, Polish, Italian, Albanian and Persian. More about her can be found at sheikha82.wordpress.com