When the wolves appear, I know I am dreaming.
Give me back my dark. They call out in Gujarati & no howling
could terrify me as much. The wolf-eyes look like eyes in family photographs.
They follow me. I run & don’t look back.
I am terrified of the land. In the sea, my body is a vase
filled with ovate black stones.
I sink I sink I sink. Where have the wolves gone & where is the voice
that held the whorls of my fingers in its clay?
Is it fair to wish for them now? They don’t belong in this version of a version
of India that wets my hair & deposits my skin onto the shore—
to get to the bone. To get to the language.
I want to say yes I want to become a stream of sugar cane & milk,
& wash through the aquifers. To pick up dark stalks of clove along the way.
I want to carry my dark with me. Stretch out legs of jasmine vine &
call out to the deep space between the moons. Every night I open my mouth.
Every night, my mouth is an orbiting, elliptical no.
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living Scotland, where she is a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, Third Coast Magazine, PRISM International, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, wildness, and Room Magazine. Her work was also selected for the 2018 edition of the Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology. Alycia is the Creative Writing and Reviews editor at HARTS & Minds, and she co-edits the multilingual publication, The Polyglot. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon in 2014.