Tarfia Faizullah's "Reading Transtromer in Bangladesh"

Split This Rock  Poem of the Week -  Tarfia Faizullah                                                                 Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh        .......for Meherunnessa Chowdhury, 1924-2010    i. In Grandmother's house, we are each a room that must remain locked. Inside it, a prayer mat carelessly folded on a low table, as though hands that once pressed down on it are not below ground. Who has stripped bare the white walls of the black velvet tapestry depicting Ka'bah, house of God? I let in the netherworld. Something rose from underneath. I sit, wait through my cousin's sobs. This morning, another sudden loss: a classmate's death, she says. Sordid details flare out like sails of a ship: mother trapped in an asylum, father weeping, son's warm body cradled in his arms, bone still lodged in his young throat. To whom would this not be an inelegant death--a caught bone, too much like one of our own? ii. We leave the city as we entered it: cloaked in fog, lightbulbs, lanterns, blurred gold-- the rumbling traffic on the highways, and the silent traffic of ghosts. I reach for my mother's hand like a child. Here hang the years . . . they sleep with folded wings. Already my body begins to shed each jagged dirt road, bodies jostled inside each swerving car, trains draped with bodies dangling like writhing vines-- iii. The cars, packed tight, do not move. I saw the image of an image of a man coming forward . . . sudden as starlight, he lifts an arm: mere bone, wrapped in brown skin, stem of an iris rotting in water. He taps the glass. I close my eyes, see his arm trapped in a young boy's throat. It is still beautiful to hear the heart, but often the shadow seems more real than the body. How small the distance between the world and the world: a few layers of muscle and fat, a sheet wrapped around a corpse: glass so easily ground into sand.   -Tarfia Faizullah              Used by permission. Originally appeared in The Missouri Review.  Tarfia Faizullah's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passages North, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow and a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University's creative writing program, she is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Margaret Bridgman scholarship, a Kenyon Writers Workshop Peter Taylor fellowship, and other honors. She lives in Washington, DC, where she helps edit the Asian American Literary Review and Trans-Portal.      Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.     Split This Rock www.splitthisrock.org info@splitthisrock.org 202-787-5210