Ode to Ellipsis

                                 Those callused & concentric circles of glory. 
                      The cotton back of each of your earned moons.
The butterfly’s milk licked by a needle on your tongue.

                                                          Language heals itself between your seismic stutter. 
                                 Accidental overture of solace, language bears more teeth.
             At your bitsy nebula, our mother’s mother's at ease.

                                                                           Inside the peacock’s spiral, silence thrums.
                                            There is no music without the space between heaven. 
                                 Language too needs the night to notice its eye. Pulse Snark Slite.

                      How sonic your solitude. How fevered your gauze.  
           Of disbelief. A bell in water. Barrels of fire. 
Thrown down the staircase of the page.

                                                                  O' small orients of sight. O' exhausted seer.
                                  Trek to the upside down candle beneath your skulls.
           Havocs of desire paused before the next sudden break.

                                                                                        In genius, whatever, brings me closer to. 
                                                       Mercy. Before the cymbals drop, I carry this broken.
                      Motion. I begin again & again. Just for the chance to hear you.

Aap Jaisa Koi

once a month the moon changes its face

& every morning your knuckle resembles mine

more & more, i notice patterns & form, realize

everyday i neglect the beauty of angels

life repeated back like numbers:

my chin on my mother’s face

this incessant disco anthem clothes

lines of women, arrowing their

fingers to the sky: Nazia Hassan’s grave

at night my eyes point up to the blue

costume we give to a binary God

in music i hear the angels

tell me how to follow spirals

into the enclaves of lack, of jurisdiction, of

performance: a human crime, i hope not

to be incessant, i am only trying to

make a beat: Pattern. Pattern. Form.

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Diya Abbas is a first-generation Pakistani poet from the Midwest. Her poems are featured or forthcoming in Poetry Daily, RHINO, Foglifter, diode, The Offing, and others. She is currently studying English and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison through the First Wave program. Find more of their work at diyabbas.com.