by Sara Afshar
i.
Separated at the lake,
you try to call me home.
I am transfixed by a shock
of turkey vultures
gorging themselves
on what was once a doe.
Bone,
a string of ligament,
a band.
Cartilage in a beak
at the end
of a red-raw face.
Cleansing the earth beneath.
Carefully adjusting wings,
making room
for a neighbor to eat.
Soon, there will be no carcass,
just absence.
Soon, I won’t be able to tell
where it was
I saw it lying dead.
ii.
That morning we
had sex
on your dirty sheets.
Any love I’ve been given,
I’ve taken.
Across the bed,
on the windowsill,
my sunflower seedlings
have grown leggy
in days of clouds and clouds.
Your phone is silently ringing.
A defeated text ensues.
Somehow,
in the Signal group chat
between you, Chris,
Khaled and Mo,
where pounds of weed are
moved,
an invitation.
We can get a vaccine today
if we go to Dearborn now.
If she knew I was alerted
to a surplus of doses
by the Muslim plug,
my mother
would die.
She’s immunocompromised.
We don’t know anyone
who has been vaccinated yet.
My uncle died three days ago
in Kashmir.
My mother’s brother.
You and I leave for the mosque.
iii.
It’s the largest one
in North America.
To be religious
is excellent for a young
vocabulary. I knew prostration
by the time I was eight.
Ablution, submission, reckoning.
I instilled within myself
a striving for such spotless chastity
that the veils of this mortal world
would be cleft asunder.
I do not seek to free myself from blame.
I am consoled and culpable.
Relieved to be vaccinated,
relieved to be American,
always first.
Under the low rows
of conspicuous chandeliers,
I wonder
which of myselves
to dispatch.
iv.
The last time
I was in a mosque
I was asked to leave,
in Kashmiri,
by a man with an AK-47.
My cousin led me
through an entrance
not meant for me.
Culpable.
Low stars over Himalayas,
a man selling calendulas
from a wooden boat on Dal Lake.
Consoled.
My uncle died when he got
to the hospital.
He entered mosques
through any door he liked.
I barely knew him. It’s inconceivable
to think an easy word—
paper— kept me away
from my parents’ entire family.
After my shot,
I am handed a small paper.
In Kashmir,
my uncle had a printing press.
He published
my grandfather’s poems.
Never in Urdu.
Only Kashmiri.
I cannot not fill the lack.
A little girl reading
among the reams of blank paper.
Realizing how deep
the deficiency went
once my own brothers
had children. I imagine
him examining a poem
I wrote with the same
enthusiasm I gave my nephew’s
rendering of a boat, tumbling
over a waterfall, the scene
remarkably comprehensible.
How I gathered everyone
around the mantel where
I hung his various works.
How could he
grieve me when I die
if never loved those first paintings.
I call my mother
from the parking lot
of the masjid
to tell her the story
of the mosque-vaccination.
She asks if I prayed for my uncle.
Heedless. Selfish. Tactless.
You and I drive
to a marly, boatless lake.
v.
I’ve lost the thread
of the chain-stitched
nuthatch.
His feather sewed
against mine. Cannot
pretend otherwise.
By now,
I should be calling back
to your voice.
Cannot tell if a birdcall comes
from above the tree line.
Do not know where to go from here.
By dead reckoning,
I could try
to navigate
without explanation,
nor circumstance.
Alone.
Dislocation. To a place
I could appear
in thin air.
Sara Afshar is a poet from Massachusetts. She works as a legal services immigration lawyer, specializing in cases related to unaccompanied child migrants and Afghans evacuated during the 2021 fall of government. Her work has appeared in journals that include Sporklet, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, and Adroit Journal. Sara is from a family of Iranian-Kashmiri refugees and has an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is a poetry editor at the Adroit Journal.