the photography of home

ivory doves return to the shrine in mazar-e-
sharif & a woman takes the weight off. the bird
lands on her brown burqa showcasing
sunflower seeds. her open palm [ ]
a thousand blessings.

the familiar brown body of a teen pulling water
from a well & sal-saal’s embezzled eyes
shy away from his axed leg. the boy’s potato land
frontier [ ] casting off pharaohs.

plump eyelids & juvenile fists are ichor, she
wears henna circles & is married to [ ].
an infant & letting the sheer display her gray.
trembling in snow she conceals the grotesque.

three men sipping chai talkh on kandahar
road, returnees rummage a clean bathroom & van
drivers joined by a coriander. karzai’s kingdom
[ ] five hundred kilometers.
the cassette tapes rave & kababs jabber.

now strange: i pulled myself out of the map
& soaking sugar lumps [ ] luster
paper sheets fly in thick flock. i carry broken
feathers & forage for filling the void: i prescribe
english.

road trip

is an extension
movement of the right
hand with multiple
pinched nerves—a syndrome
of being out the window
waiting for a gust
the odyssey is his
driving us
i am only taking notes, browsing maps, seemingly they
move us

sometimes an upbringing
story can be empowering
like a quarter-tone scale
curves my pre-
-disposition of being held
in a historical maternal scent
to get a glimpse of her grass
colored eyes
if i close my eyes to the numb-
-er of miles

the secret of lending
credence
to a ghostly appearance—carry
a night dream into a discussion
of what happened and scrub it off
only after your teeth are clean—
by the faculty of retrieving
i held her jaw in my palms
liquids barely circulating her body
in english the body is both
alive and not

and if i were to choose
the strongest sense, touch
with its ability of measuring
its intelligence of distance—his ears
to his chin is long for five inches
—five silent hyphens
rains over wallpapers
scarecrow firefly a barnyard
in the midwest, and how the same grammar
dictates the east splits the volumes
from their collective subjects

Hajar Hussaini is a poet from Afghanistan and is currently a graduate student of Creative Writing at Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Roadrunner Review, Azure: A Journal of Literary Thought, and Atlanta Review.