Issue 15: Amaan Hyder
The Clot
Alif
What is a fit?
A holy thing is a fit.
A life is a fit.
I hear fifty machines stitching,
inking a grip.
Someone came to the door.
Someone was listening to us.
When I wake I am told what happened.
I pressed eject, mouths my father.
I pressed enough, mouths my mother.
She leaves in a car that shoots light.
Lam
What is a fit?
Someone trying to believe is a fit.
A life is a fit.
I’m sitting at the dining table.
I don’t know what the words mean
but I know the letters. This is alif,
this is beh, this is the sword that
shoots light. Yes, that’s right, I nod.
I can see my father in the hallway
signing the channel to be recorded.
My father is a video forwarded.
My mother is a video recorded over.
Do you remember ejecting a tape,
the ribbon crackling behind it?
That’s the currency. A snippet
of preface notes. Someone making
a face in belief is a fit.
One country and then another is a fit.
Mim
In America, there are Mayo and Baylor.
There is a video of opinion meeting itself.
They request you rewind as a courtesy.
So I’m sitting at the dining table.
I don’t know what the words mean
but I know the letters. There is my father
interrogating after.
There is my mother and what’s going on
behind our heads. There are the letters
passing through my fingers:
this is a house, this is an ox’s head.
This is beh, this is alif.
Inheritable Landscape
1.
Can I run round? Yes you can run round,
but Mohammed, can you come here?
Let me tell you where you can run round.
A pot handle. Or a cup handle
designed for if you don’t want
to put your hand in the fire.
A ladder of buzzers.
This machine, I tell you.
He will not be your friend. Not at,
but not unhappy.
I’m blinking out an eyelash.
Blinking out tourists is the taxi.
It’s the Smoke. Late in the movement.
Citizens of carbohydrate,
hopeful connoisseurship.
Don’t copy me I’m a bad
crosser of roads was an opener.
It was during a sculling lesson
on a lake the other side of town.
The instructor kept on turning
to X to ask my name.
Kept on using the spoon
that’s been in the rice.
Don’t pass it, he stared.
2.
The unmentioned is
that I’m jake with everyone in this ballad.
I tried tracking them down last month
but it’s odd they left on the assumption
the stats have aligned.
Sameer’s grown, got his own
how’s your bottom?
How do I not leave them, pocket-sore,
and get to you?
On the spine of a street: two bikes,
excited. Two at festivals.
You’re going to look back and
I’m going to look back and
there’s been this van up and down
past the shop really slow.
I’m excited to see our raspberries are
ready and they shouldn’t be ready
for another month.
3.
Why do I remember the original,
forget the eight bars of the harmonium?
Feroze pointed out that I never
slept with my arms by my sides, hands
collecting signatures across
the diaspora. Everywhere arthritis,
WhatsApp fallings out.
The interview began
as a conversation between
lust overcoming fear walking
in the house at night.
I emailed it to myself and forgot
by nineteen I knew the country was all
have they called Y to menswear?
As if we’re not busy?
Hence the garb. Hence the drag,
hence the dross.
We need to encourage people to join
the grass roots. Save announcements
of change, it has made a mockery of
all of us. And apropos plunges:
what’s it like to soak in milk?
Do you open your eyes?
Do you see white? Do you
feel it in your bones?
Amaan Hyder’s poems have appeared in Poetry Review, The Rialto and POEM.
