Bailey Davis
Echo
Hajjar Baban
The sense repeats, fills a room with no space for silence.
As a response or the condition that brought me here?
I’d feel a little special if I could build your air with my hands.
If I had even less to say.
Anti-Elegy
Beginning with a line by Lucille Clifton and ending with a line by Liu Zongyuan
I am not equal to the faith required
to grieve your black hair, words short,
and mirroring toward ready disappearance. I’m left
with very little to construct an image out of,
myth shading in that time
for what was not life. Now I can say no
since I fly not above but near,
lightweight to replace your
steady disappointment. No, anger.
I can only think of you faintly and always,
like a stubborn sprite tying me
down forever in childhood. Underneath
all my present, infecting. There’s nothing to
recover, you will have to make yourself again
for another, reveal slivers, try to hide
what you do not know— your self,
ten thousand paths and not a single footprint.
Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. She has poems in Prairie Schooner,
West Branch Mag, and The Hopkins Review.