In Kumbakonam, a man’s hard mouth
Sarah Mohammed
tumbles open. He plucks
a girl at the marketplace who is waiting
for her father, who is looking
down at where the ground
fissures, where dust collects
in its wake. After he presses a hand
to her shoulder in a shackle
of skin, she closes her eyes
and follows. Soon he will call
her wife. Soon she will not speak
but fold her hands together, shadowed
and graceless. The girl
whose face mirrors my own—she might
have spent years before this imagining
herself awash on some shore, gnawing
over what she could be: terrifying, beautiful,
desperate. Through the window
of my mother’s home I watch
the two of them move like forest
trees: touch spiritless and flickering.
My mother whisks
me to the kitchen, brings her face
to mine, a gaze I rush to mimic: our heads
down, our breathing settling.
We must keep to our small selves.
Village girls like my mother learned
no myths because they must
not wander. When my mother was young, her father
would haggle for the family’s fullness
in this marketplace, his eyes skimming
metal buckets of salt and fish.
Want is a complicated thing.
At night, I run talcum powder across
my cheeks and dream of aging
in this village—my burka ribboning
my wrists, stamping them in smoke.
about the writer
Sarah Fathima Mohammed is a brown, Muslim-American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, wildness, DIALOGIST, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She has been named a 2021 YoungArts Finalist in Writing (Poetry) and has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Poetry Society of the UK, Claudia Ann Seaman Awards, and Hollins University, among others. When she is not writing, she serves as executive editor for Polyphony Lit.