—for E. R. Shaffer
When
I buy
you
coffee,
you
worry
/ I’ll
tire
of
bringing you tea / and sticking straws in your juice / boxes. Fifty years, / you say, is a long time. // Yes. It is longer even / than the time I waited, writing / poems to no one about how / it might feel to love and to be / loved—ghazals and qasa’id // that quoted the Qur’an and alluded / to ahadith. I didn’t know why / till I read that book you recommended, / though I should have known / earlier. I’d been on hormones // a few months when spring / slipped up my skirt—when I learned / a woman can have sex with the wind / —but no person ever / touched me like you do. // My memories scrape like last / fall’s leaves blown / from the garden path. Buds / of new words for the hollow / of my body tease on branches // not yet woken. Without / yours, my tongue is barren./ Where could I turn but to the desert? / From what could I recite except spurs / of companions I followed to Medina, // learning devotion and submission / as contours of the wind? I have known / nothing like the catch of my breath / when you bite me, except the way / I used to gnaw at the ropes // of the last Allahu akbar / holding up my body— / nothing like the way you leave / me shaking save the kiss / of my forehead on clean earth, // the panting tumble of the words / like brains dashed out in rubies . . ./ Subhanna rabbiyal Allah. / In those moments, you take / water from the nightstand, // give me to drink from what I have / brought you, and it is as the Prophet ﷺ / said: “Whoever gives a Muslim / water when water is available, / it is as if he has freed a slave.”//Should I cease, then, that service / that fills the cups that free me? / The straw between your lips, / nujaym, is a qiblah, and I / could no more tire // of bringing you juice than a houri / could tire of bearing wine, / a muslimah tire of her daily / prayers. I confess, my love, / that I do not know the shape // of this poem, whether it is meant / to be a juice box / or a prayer rug with a string / of beads for tasbih. In both, / the verses read the same.
Reyzl Grace is a writer, librarian, and translator whose work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other periodicals. Currently a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre, she lives as an expat in Minneapolis with her novelist girlfriend, arguing over which of them is the better writer. (It’s her girlfriend.) Find more of her at reyzlgrace.com and on social media @reyzlgrace.