Huma Aatifi

Take Leave

Sitting in the solitude corner, Kebira
Came, to give me a pink jalaba for a body

unreal in placement within the stars’ terms.
Lust, where a human descends to lower realm

like a magnet, in whirlpool of weight, submerged
by immersionable heedlessness, as I took

the gift realized how poorly divorced
from point to point of unity is my thinking.

Everything goes. Must it? Must everything
go? Now? I wish

every moment to live
distractionless, in motion but sunken to the floods of goodness

which lately is hardly a speech to find opposition in.
See, the sea is deficit since I wish to be

dust under all soles in a transient two dimensional
images. Under rapids of veils like a gray whale

fleeting to the undercurrents.
Dualities in life rush

in together undersea. And to
wish for a head full of pictures, none other.

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Huma Aatifi is an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College and Lehman college. She is a former Truman Capote fellow at Brooklyn College where she was a graduate student of poetry.