Aftermath
by Saima Afreen
I have not spun the sky nor its light
since the breeze you left follows my bones,
its phosphorus, all the glowing letters
when it gets dark, when I gasp at its fire
the craft of centuries holding the air between
the graphemes of our names, behind
our rib cages concealed with dry branches
like cursed palaces lulled only by embrace
of ivy, its poison the only antidote holding
its fading light the last of the Christmas trinkets
it traps your body from the air, travelling
to my country, my tongue. To offer the world
a perfumed story, its mouth—its resting place
the world is ready to unearth and swallow
since the breeze you left follows my bones,
its phosphorus, all the glowing letters
when it gets dark, when I gasp at its fire
the craft of centuries holding the air between
the graphemes of our names, behind
our rib cages concealed with dry branches
like cursed palaces lulled only by embrace
of ivy, its poison the only antidote holding
its fading light the last of the Christmas trinkets
it traps your body from the air, travelling
to my country, my tongue. To offer the world
a perfumed story, its mouth—its resting place
the world is ready to unearth and swallow

Saima Afreen is a poet, teaching-artist, journalist, essayist, and abstract expressionist. Her works have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Indian Literature, The Bellevue Literary Review, HCE Review, Barely South Review, The Bellingham Review, The Roanoke Review, The Stillwater Review, The McNeese Review, The Nassau Review, The Oklahoma Review, Apricity Magazine, Staghill Literary Journal, The Notre Dame Review, Honest Ulsterman, Watershed Review, Dreich Magazine, Chronogram Magazine, and Existere among others. She is pursuing a PhD with concentration in Creative Writing from Illinois State University (ISU), the US. She is the author of poetry collection Sin of Semantics (Copper Coin) and a poetry chapbook titled Winter Biomythography (Press 254). She was a Sutherland Fellow at the Publications Unit of ISU where she worked as an editorial support for various in-house publications for one academic year. She was awarded the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of Kent, the UK. She was the writer-in-residence for Fall at Villa Sarkia Writers’ Residency, Finland.