JASMINE KHALIQ

Jasmine Khaliq is a Pakistani Mexican poet born and raised in Northern California. Her work is found or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, The Pinch, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University and an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. A finalist for Diagram’s 2021 Chapbook Contest as well as both Tupelo Press’ 2021 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and Snowbound Chapbook Award, she currently is a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, serves as Assistant Editor of Quarterly West, and reads for Split Lip Magazine.

imaginary homeland

generations later
in seattle I pass

a room of pianos
my face in the gloss

to be body crossed
on strings and sliced

by sound
when I say

I want to go back
I mean into soil

rust and wet
no where specific

LAST AUGUST

with lines from Hélène Cixous’ 1994 essay “Love of the Wolf,” trans. Keith Cohen

 

in august I think about last august
a baby I know turns eight

my mouth shut until september
my body twenty-three thousand bees

I got mad and I got
what I wanted

so what am I mourning today?
I miss dogs in windows
I miss ducks in water
I wish I had really wailed

had laid in the lawn untethered,
frowned with all my face

and made you look on it.
I have felt too hurt to exist in the world.

days all the same and senseless
someone cutting an ear from every horse in france

sea lions on canadian beaches scattered like grain
and equally headless, and no one will say why

would you know me by my ankle?
does my suffering become me?

hot nights I wondered if loving you was a lack
of imagination, or an over-active one.

dreamt us redressing in barns
dreamt I could only see your back

dreamt you as the warmth in my thumbs
what do other people convince themselves of?

I could call anything romantic
I always get like this looking at hills
bodies sleeping on their sides
yes headless, and dreamless as pears

that which is given in love cannot be taken back,
Cixous wrote. I beg you, eat me up.

in august I think about last august
orange and swallowed and shrieking and blue

I miss my old dog in my old window
I miss my old dog on my old doorstep

I offered pieces of myself everywhere
I’ve changed over and over

LEAVING SEATTLE, LATE JUNE

Raw roe in long sun
I worried over you but not enough to call
I bought cigarettes to smoke one alone

My favorite walks were in the snow
and unknown to everyone

Double Yolk extends gratitude to Seneca Review for first publishing “imaginary homeland” and Raleigh Review for publishing “Last August”.