Illustration by Tehreem Ali
For more than 9 months, I lived
In a womb that smelled of gunpowder.
Yes, you see…I was spit out from the mouth
Of a bullet hole, for
My mother is a gun.
Like a dragon egg sliding onto the dry desert,
I slid onto a dry shaft of galvanized rubber:
The world.
In the desert I roamed, searching for substance, shape.
There was neither a wall nor a shoe to cower behind,
So I dug burrows and learned to survive
With the moles and the rattlesnakes.
These state buildings weigh my head down;
The human noise ties itself around my soul.
No one hears my chokes –
I grew up like a cactus: my milk skin, pure and innocent.
But beneath it are thorns, pointy fingers
Of rapists and abductors. And the sloth
Of womanizers’ lungs. It’s consumed all my respiratory space.
Like a hungry raven rips off its prey’s flesh,
Time ripped me off until the 23rd layer of my life
Stared back with gory eyes.
My transparent life-line is connected with
A poet gone before me:
A mother of gothic chants and spells
Who is still casting their magic on the minds
Of these disbelievers, the poetry-haters, the poetry-Nazis.
I sent my manuscript to my ancestral reincarnation,
My self who puffed in the carbon monoxide
Air of the ‘63. A response has finally arrived:
Hickeys on every page.
The lip marks of Auntie Death are
An open invitation.
Born from a gun of a mother,
Spied upon by auntie Death all my life,
I ought to sign the deal and let her publish
My works at last.
Tehreem Ali is a literature-linguistics student by field but a writer at heart. She self-published her first fiction novella at the age of fifteen. Art, anarchism, music, animals, and writing are the center of her world. She aspires to show the world, through her writings, that there are no rules in art. You will find Tehreem’s writings to be a mixture of polar opposites, with Sylvia Plath, Alan Ginsberg, and the like as major influences. The world might not be ready yet for voices like hers. Follow this link to keep up with Tehreem or check out her blog here.
