Two Poems

Kathryn Belsey

Nadia Anjuman
    (Afghan Poet, 1980-2005)

She was a smoke-veined flower in a bed of moldering roots.
She grew in a room of two darks,
the black burqas screening sand gnats and wind.

She went through two schools of learning:
the first not to laugh or click her shoes, the second to open
the banned writings to learn to make clothes
without sewing. She was a dark red flower
uprooting her schools. By fall,
the gauze thinned. She very nearly
wrote a second book, but then she hurt her husband’s fist
with her face and taught him the strength of his right arm.
The shame her love poetry brought on her family.
They refused a post mortem.

We paper poets are deader still.
Small insects fly out of our vacant eyes and mouths—
buzz, buzz—signifying nothing.
We listen on the edge of our seats to our own wind, whistling.

She sleeps on a smoke-veined pyre of smoldering cloth.
She sings like a bird in a wingless cage.
Her poems paper the walls of the university.
The dark blows cold fruit from the trees all winter.

She lay on the floor of her apartment and bled out of time.
She flew to her husband’s cell.
He said, “How could I kill someone I loved?
We had a small argument, and I only slapped you once.
What will I tell our infant son?
Tell me you forgive me, and I will tell them
you died of a heart attack.”

The authorities are after her.
She has rolled herself in the dark carpet of history.
She’s hiding in the stalls of the market.
She says, “I am for sale,
but only if you can pay what I am asking.”

***

Spring Cleaning

The Lord’s word—hidden in the fifth
chamber of her heart, which never stopped
generating sin—spoke
seven truths the woman memorized:
the beloved voice purring into her hair,
the friends who smiled approval
when she entered the sanctuary, the word
sanctuary, at the dining room table
her husband paying bills into the night,
the full-length mirror, cracked
down the middle, reflecting nothing
but brokenness,
a pile of clothes that didn’t fit,
and a poem no one should have read—
it wasn’t so much what she kept but what
she kept giving away.

Kathryn Belsey earned an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in January, 2010. While in the MFA program, her poetry was nominated for the Associated Writers and Writing Programs Intro to Journals Award. She is a member of the editorial board of Poetry International and has been a free-lance editor for fifteen years. She is a lifelong resident of San Diego County and a celebrant of all things extraordinary. These two poems are her first publications.

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