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Click title to download PDF microchap
Cover design by Jan Keough
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Grief is a Firefly
a wall is gnarled,
and rain-blotched outside
my window, I refuse
to vandalize it with binaries:
it displaces my reveries,
the way poetry does
and the tawdry absence of it,
I’m blue and rinsed by the
psithurism of a mulberry tree.
Empty Threat
My brother is trying to reach
into a drawer. It’s Monsoon.
The furniture is an adhesive now
like moist mesoglea; a thin film of
hymen for things that don’t breathe.
Mother’s cooking-voice scours
the sweat-sequined air. We rush
through lunch then supper,
horsewhips thrashing our tongues.
My brother struggles to open
the drawer with a wooden ladle,
mother shouts and absconds into
her chores. ‘Where is he now?’
“Still grieving his taste buds.”
He has a penchant for chewing
bank-fresh notes, tens and hundreds.
Papa’s car honk is a whiplash to
adjourn the remaining day’s journey.
My brother swallows his crinkled
spit. Mother reappears, zaps past us
in her ironed kurta. The griddle is
aromatized by chapati, the door mat;
an empty threat awaiting some realness,
the key in the door bows in prostration.
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Penumbra
We always thought apocalypse
would begin when Gog Magog
exclaim Insha’Allah! But it came to
us in the shape of a trifling crown,
now the skies are a clear periwinkle,
a toddler caws in the dingy alleys, there
is no bloodbath, the shrubbery is not
dredged in shrapnel and there are no
potholes bestrewn with dismembered
corpses, every car that whirs past
the Sunday bazaar has its own story
of death, a man abluted in attar of roses
offers his wife a silk dupatta; touching
her pale rubescent heart like a mask
catching a scintilla of breath from our
mouths, a grandfather carefully trudges
over a speed breaker believing it is a
grave for all the graves left undug, his
white turban a supernal halo, a talisman
girdles around his neck; mourning all
the souls it was supposed to protect
when magic existed to harm even those
who are long dead and erased, he moves
past the street kids playing with water-
inflated condoms, he reincarnates a grin.
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House of Dissociation
I want to write a story
I could read to the disinterest
that’s impaled inside my gut.
The crows look into my pupils,
black-beaked Israfil,
Bleak – a word in my head,
a faint sound in my gasps,
I try to pronounce it
with my idiolect;
a tireless cannibal I tame;
ropes, chains and whips.
Under the lampshade,
a book isn’t holy or cursed,
braided tresses wipe
the crass ink of meaning,
I feel my toes, twitching beneath
my thighs. It’s extraordinary,
to move a part of myself,
to come back wherever this is
with an easeful involuntary jerk.
Voices in this chest are a shield of
glaucoma for Israfil’s soulful trumpet.
I turn the page with
the spit on my index finger,
because now I can.
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Israfil (Arabic: إِسْـرَافِـيْـل, Isrāfīl; or Israfel or
Rafā'īl) is the angel who blows into the trumpet to signal Qiyamah (the Day of Judgment), therefore often considered an angel of music. Though unnamed in the Quran, he is one of the four Islamic Archangels, along with Mīkā'īl, Jibrā'īl, and Azrā'īl. The "Book of Dead" described Israfil as the oldest of all archangels. It is believed that Israfil will blow the trumpet from a holy rock in Jerusalem to announce the Day of Resurrection. He is commonly thought of as the counterpart of the Judeo-Christian archangel Raphael.
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Hiba Heba © 2021
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Hiba Heba is a Pakistan-based writer and poet. She earned her Bachelor of English Literature and Linguistics degree from Air University and currently she is applying for scholarships abroad.