"I Do not fear time"-Registers of illuminated villages

“What is meant by/ the word recovery?/ Aftermath is red dirt,/ red dirt, red dirt and you

are creases of crickets/ thicketing corners/ of this and every room/

I decide that I am safe. You are still/ below ground,/an infinite autumn.” (64)

Predawn on a Sunday I woke thinking about death.

About senselessness it makes out of time

The paranoia and fragmentation of the mind

When riveted awake with sorrow

A tired I imagine different than that one from the delusional joy

Of a new born.

A tired that makes light the density of your bones

And dust of clear thought,

Of the ability to feed oneself,

Of memory of trash day,

Of the color of lights that mean forward movement

And which mean yield,

Of whether you canceled his subscription to Netflix

Or Turned off the gas on the stove, 

Of Forsight into a future beyond grief.

“The number of times my insomniac/ friend said the word tomorrow,

the number of years any cactus/outlasted my sister, pound for pound

of the weight I lost then gained.” (29)

How time gets measured by totally different markers.

Not at all equal in their intervals.

What is the register of death, of those lost?

Who is left to account for those things left behind? What even is their meaning?

“Who counts dolls, hands-

Stitched, facedown in dirt? Count to four. Five. Six. Count/Cadaver, stone, belongings: pots,

Spun from red clay” (6)

Surprising specimens left behind:

1.     2 doctor issued bottles with child safe caps-contents stones of various sizes removed from various organs

2.     bag of  stale swag and a collection of pipes

3.     one year chip, a journal of steps and shuffles, a gallon handle of vodka

4.     yellow college ruled legal pad dated daily todo with rubber library stamp-“order 37 roses for Alisha’s birthday.

If I was to receive 37 flowers on my birthday I would surly cry.

“I do not fear time” Nina Simone

I have come to fear April.

I grew up with my mom reciting

“April is the cruelest Month, breeding

lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

memory with desire” along with a myriad

of other assorted texts.

This year your anniversary falls on Sunday

And I half expect that Easter morning

You might rise from the saved voicemails

That cram my inbox full so no one can leave a message.

In my dream you were there on the couch but no one could see you.

Come to tell me about the fish you had planned to catch that morning you never woke

Detail the happening of that last super

At Hooters out with the boys.

Poetic justice for an unpoetic life

Lived unfulfilled, half empty, dripping out a crack

In the glass never fixed a top a stack of papers you left

Disarray covering each surface

Crowding everywhere to sit,

Breakfast standing at the kitchen ironing board

Strewn with magazines

Things to fix upon your departure:

1.     Hole in the wall ushering cockroaches in this cohabitated space

2.     Fault-line in the ceiling cracked through patching done 3 years ago

3.     Reassemble desk sleg-hammered apart for removal through narrow doorway. Reassemble nightly, multitask while sleeping.

Who takes the position of accounting for death?  In what register is it written?

This book so elegantly crafted, framed by the hidden registers of Hunger, of Submission, of Solace, and at the end of the book, after the notes, the register of Astonishment.  Listening to Faizullah’s poems online in her voice I can hear her tempo, her rhythm through out the collection in what is such a mature, precise and measured exploration of what it is to know death personally and what it is to try to understand it from a far.  What death feels like in the body when it is the loss of kin, and what losing the nameless feels like. And what it feels like the “first day you learn how to kill yourself without dying” Because “your own country demands it” (16).

Her word constructions cut:

“you the memory of my sorrow to keep, seed

of her ghost-“ (60)

and

“my piles of chicken-bone sorrow” (29)

and

“The sky was famished with stars” (21)

and

“I told the water/ You only exist because of thirst” (85)

“It is important to observe death”(17)  her uncle tells her and it is death that she observes, turns over,  under many shafts of light to recon these words into being.