it’s late & yet so early, the sun’s cheeks flushing into melody, bees circling your wrists in the backyard like summer & Thangachi touches your forehead, rubs her chubby hand, sticky with red popsicle & both of you laying in dead stalks of grass, dark hair splayed together, hot like wildfire & your eyes are glazed & her eyes are glazed & you tell her a million fairytales, each one heat-slow, knotted in honey-- once there was a princess who married a princess & once there were two queens & two princesses, a bloodline of women soft as seasilk & once there were two moons, bodies identical feeding each other a spoonful of sky & once two angels swallowed each other’s lips & Allah said okay & she’s too little & you feel too old & from the corner of your vision you see two half-opened sunflowers blooming from the cracked pavement lining the cul-de-sac & they remind you of Amy & nothing feels alright but here you are & you let Thangachi pry the stories from your hands callused with worry & you imagine her opening the knots into sticks of light & you remember Amy & her hair, soft as night, how you ran your fingers through the strands in the half-light, how she found the syllables in your breath & pulled them out one by one like fireflies & she murmured, don’t be afraid, both of you falling asleep, legs tangled, bodies warm & bed too small & when a sliver of light touched your eyelids you prayed for repentance, prayed to not be afraid, prayed for Allah’s nod, her breath falling into your neck like a memory & you thought, this is what it means to love & now Amma brings out incense & it coats the wind in grease, smoke lifting like a soft prayer & again, you hope for forgiveness.
Sarah Fathima Mohammed is a Muslim-American emerging writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and the National Poetry Quarterly’s Editors’ Choice Prize. When she is not writing, she serves as managing editor for The Aurora Review.