A. Shaikh

ASSIMILATE & FLOURISH

This is one method of queerness.

               Two bodies undressing like fruit.

A wish: her palm against my palm, fingers drenched.

Picture me, my hopeful-love says on the phone, at my desk painting.

I do, ignoring the news.

Twelve days to the election and I’m girlcrushing.

I had always felt kind of tough, but now I am just a faggot.¹

Forgive me, beloved, for the hours between doomsday and now.

                                             I hunger to lick, bite, bruise.

                                             I don’t want to be political.

In Dallas, the weather is a wet drum tune.

My mother is a poet, but without the privilege of language.

Memory and time.

               Scared                                                     Sacred.

               I invoke prayer in the bathtub.             Look at me god, I cry out.1

                           I gnawsuck on the shape of my knee—Peach pits and apple seeds.

               My horoscope shrieks!

Everyone I know tweets about their IUD.

                           I spend nights on the Am I a Lesbian? Masterdoc.

My angel-love can’t relate.

I fortunately have no interest in men with clarity

I envy her sureness, seduced by it.

Ask yourself if you can be truthfully happy, the document suggests.

With men. A man. America.

Oh crisis, she comments.

Soon we will be uninsured, unmarried, unemployed.

I remain parched after inhaling a bowl of milk.

My mother says make good choices, quiet and upset.

Older and older, I unfurl away from my old country.

Night time, I let the good dream bob in my throat—the one with my ocean-love’s dark curls soaped back.

                           She says my name, a foam soft syllable, a fragment.

                                         I spoon my sticky womanwound. Numb to what cannot save me.

When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.²

My mother hasn’t seen her mother unpixelated in four years.

I confess to my American-love: I don’t know who I am with or without you.³

I slide the fat off whatever we are.

I imagine myself shivering at the nape of her neck.

                           There is nothing more sexual.

                                         Some thousand miles away from her blue state.

My passport is a hoax.

I research. Pragmatic solutions to unpragmatic problems.

               The internet is a spell, my poet-love translates.

On the playground, children saw me as a citizen.

The thing is it wasn’t long ago when I was a little girl.⁴

Assimilate & Flourish, advertises whitehouse.gov⁵

I don’t know how to afford this perfume, but I guess I will have to.

I can be killed in a nightclub. I can be detained like a dog.

I listen to my mother fear monger. Straight-laced but brain out of order.

                           Badqueer. Goodimmigrant.

                           A daughter, I was made impossible.

A. Shaikh is an immigrant poet raised in the tangerine summers of Texas. She is an associate and intern for The Kenyon Review, Editor-in-Chief of Sunset Press, and an Aquarius who loves the color blue. You can find her poems in Underblong, Poets.org, and elsewhere. Her internet thoughts reside @apricotpoet.

Notes:
1 Excerpts from Inferno by Eileen Myles
2 A line by Marcel Proust
3 A lyric from could just cry thinking about you by Troye Sivan
4 A line from The Idiot by Elif Batuman
5 A phrase from what the Trump Presidency says about Immigration as found on whitehouse.gov: These reforms will advance the safety and prosperity of all Americans while helping new citizens assimilate and flourish.