The Mouth

The saline maw of the mussel
shuts each time I open my hand.

A bay, whaleless and surfless—and nothing
exists in water this polluted. Yet, someone insists

on having netted sardines here. We peel and savor
everything others say is delicious. Bon Appétit

sent a complimentary subscription. I searched
the proper placement of accents. I’m afraid of mispronouncing

charcuterie and oeuvre. If I cease to create my body,
these poems, no one will recall what I made.

You could have gone to culinary school. I eat dollar-ramen
when I watch The Bear. Plates scraped clean, I avoid

writing in favor of cooking. Relentless.
sauces I spent years crafting clung to the corner

of a jam jar rinsed in a midnight siphon.
What did I keep fed and alive?

A prayer mat angled towards nowhere
we have visited. Hunger is a mechanical angel,

a dull annunciation of what will soon be
in the belly. My lover always asks about semiotics.

Not in a pretentious way. He wants to know
signs, like prophecies. Omens of writer’s block

where I won’t be happy. I want to name my child
after a character who is not always happy. What part

of me is not edible? Everything is a sign.
if you look closely. I wrinkle as I age—the fauna

inside ferments. I craft wine. I scrape the gleaming armor
of salmon and lay it on stone to dry. I’ve borne these

scales and create more fish. The garland of garlic knocks
against the green door and the guests step

on wintery skins. I want to feed you. I want to
make you more

dinner.

Maggotville

Is this a way to live?
I pulled back the cover
of the garbage bin. There,a
ghastly citadel. Numinous
maggots writhing in unfurl.
Bodies like constellations stuck
on black plastic with no prophecy
to offer. I didn’t feel disgusted,
just shame that we, too, could not
coexist. I closed the lid and took
the bin outside, past our old house,
to the garbage. Flies unbecoming, eaten
by other scavengers, induce a world
of new thoughts. A way of being
in the hot rot of fruit and fever of pulps.
I tried not to tell you over dinner —
imagine a world in which
we were intelligent enough to build
from vestiges. To rely on a rotting
cosmology. To fruit something
from soft remains. Where we could
take waste and make it good. You didn’t
listen. And we went on
with our meal.

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Jai Hamid Bashir is an intergenerational Pakistani-American artist. Her work has recently appeared in POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Guernica Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Arkansas International, and others. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize, and was anthologized in 2022’s The Best of the Net. She is a Columbia University graduate in Salt Lake City, Utah.