Safira Khan

Elegy for the Damned

The light rising to your knees. Walk
across the bridge. Sing me a song.

My mother once did, an Indonesian
lullaby I stayed awake for because I

promised. Midnight child with the
Sunday blues, her damp feet stamped 

petals onto lint & mouth whispered
if I had fallen asleep. I shook my head with

heavy eyes, unwilling to admit my dreams.
In one, I took a newspaper to a concert &

looked right through it. In another,
I drove a car & it was like driving into the sea,

the wheels turning & going nowhere.
I should know by now—if there’s anything

Survival gives, it's permission to lose.
Come February & twenty, I’m imagining

desiring someone I’m afraid of, like a
slip-knot looking for its next neck. 

I look for him the last places I want to
find him: the metro by Wilshire. The

bridge no one’s named. The rink
without ice. I find him anyway. 

A body can open like a window,
if you let it. I never let it. It still opens.

We all want to feel shame sometimes.
Mine is in simple favors: drawing a tree 

up the wall. Losing dignity on Sunset
Blvd. Smoking pot because 

it’s given. My mother says she’ll
break if I don’t come home. I leave 

school without packing any bags, without
saying a word. E says I should have told her 

a lot of things, & I agree. I no longer
dream. When I did, the ice caps

broke. Waking was lonely.  The wild
husks of gooseberry dimmed.

You’d have to pry my tongue to talk about
childhood. Still have to. I don’t know 

why I was raised just to leave this world
quiet. As an act of rebellion, my brother

would take his books and read them in the
shower, leaving them wet & damaged so the

words were nothing but a smear we
lowered into moving boxes. Even 

now, I can only name loss after it’s been
buried, something I knew only after we 

fell silent, how even then, the sharp-
tailed wind blew bruises across our

sleeves, or how the Montana winters would
kill all the engines so there was

nothing left do but juice the Hatchback
in our driveway every morning before

school in our blue-fade jeans.
Our snow-thin lashes, our guileless 

hands, our lips so cut that even
closed, we called it speaking.

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Safira Khan is a senior at the University of Southern California. She is a two-time winner of the Undergraduate Writers' Conference Poetry Prize and has been published in Palaver Arts Magazine.