Sumayya Arshed

I’m sorry I forgot you after the funeral

the nurse lead me down a corridor still smelling
of disinfectant and lilies.
somewhere, a drawer shut on a name.
i said yours under my breath, but the syllables slid like marbles. 

there was a window. i remember it.
outside, marigolds curled black in the sun,
their stems bent, refusing resurrection.
i thought of your shoes by the door,
hollow vessels, waiting for a pulse.

in my chest, the hymnbook closed itself.
grief, a cursed insect that kept burrowing
under gauze, humming in the hollow between ribs.
sometimes the body can not fight. i do not begrudge you for giving up. 

they said loss is hereditary: blood knows the shape of departure.
somewhere in that hospital, an organ clang into a tray,
metal on metal, like a closing door. 

i thought of orpheus then, his throat blooming with silence,
how he turned and lost everything twice.
in my mind, you are always walking
ahead of me through that same corridor,
your hands full of mangoes, sun-bitten, bruised, still warm. 

when they lowered you, the soil coughed up its own history.
i tasted it, metallic, like a secret kept too long.
there are no echoes after that. 

in the exam room of memory,
i bundle your voice into a fist, and it slips
through my fingers. all that remains now is a chair
facing the window, a silence so clean it could cut.
a room that should have you
but does not.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sumayya Arshed is a writer and poet based in Islamabad. She has co-authored two anthologies, As the Light Fades and Things The Moon Knew. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Marrow, Ultramarine Literary Review, Full House Literary, underscore_magazine, The Bloomin' Onion, Blood+Honey, Prosetrics, Inksight and elsewhere.