3 poems by Amit Majmudar

Khwaja Mustasim Encounters the Wall

I came to them in a tie-dye kameez, tucking my earbuds snug so not to spill

one drop, clear plastic ruler bookmarking my Qur’an, my shave by a local Herati

barber named Bulleh Khan, my English by Pimsleur, my sandals a little dusty

from a sidestepped blast-radius but clacking happily as I made my way:

They chanted alleged, alleged, alleged

and up slid the Wall.

I came to them painted in sugar and body-gloved with ants, my turban off &

my obscene hair blown vertical by some unseen oracular updraft, a sandcolored

sandworm (its head one lifesized human eye) twisting angrily out of my navel, my

tongue out and tattooed with an alif, lam, mim:

They chanted, religious, religious, religious

and up slid the Wall.

I came to them with my passport out, and they saw the first name,

Mustasim, the name of the twelfth Caliph, and the last name, Rahman, the name

of God, but the middle name, Mujahid, turned out to be not just a name on their

watchlist, but the watchlist’s heading:

They chanted, radical, radical, radical

and up slid the Wall.

Naturally I grew curious about the Wall:

Preposterously plywood, perforated with face-sized ovals roughly at face level—

raw on our side, was it painted on theirs?

So I stuck my face through each oval and flinched immediately at the

firecracker camera flashes:

Below me, painted on the Wall, were the blanks I was filling in,

My face in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s slopeshouldered white-undershirted

3-am surprised-adulterer mugshot, my face in Faisal Shahzad’s courtroom

colored-pencil artist’s rendering, my face softspoken in the grainy cave-scene

Address to the Faithful beside a Kalashnikov propped like a Mosaic staff, my face

in the somewhere-outside-Peshawar training-camp VHS-still highstepping

through tires with my thumbs hooked in my belt:

The face of Mustasim Mujahid Rahman, who put the weeping in the Wall, who came

bearing nothing but ghazals

and left bearing nothing but gall.

Khwaja Mustasim Coaches his Nephew Before the Interrogation

Put on your Easter Island face.

Rattle like a lock.

Make them question you the way

suffering questions god.

One eye to squint at the naked lightbulb,

one eye the nightstick burst.

One tooth to tongue like a minty secret.

They oust the molars first.

You have a finite count of fingers,

of nipples, nerves, and teeth.

They won’t run out of methods, true,

but you’ll run out of meat.

Crowbar the crate of any toenail,

there’s nada in the jar.

The gaze that reaches them is graveglow

from an apoptotic star.

Look down. Those alligator clamps

are snapping at the rain.

Your memory softens to India ink

and under your chair is a drain.

Collected Friday Sermons of Khwaja Mustasim

1. The Fire Sermon

I was born in this circus, I am used to swallowing fire.

When a boy, I held a spent match to my skin: starstuff, temporarily tattooed

with a black hole.

I opened my book, and in the basement all twelve fuses blew right to left like

Arabic.

Popcorn in a covered pan next door? wedding-night firecrackers? epileptic

semi-automatic?

Nothing, just broken circuits, broken thoughts.

One little kitchen fire, and the wildlife hoofs it.

I poured concentric grids of kerosene, tossed aside the can, and lit this maze.

I fear no firehoses, as this is the second straight week without running water.

I have no answers, still, the fire’s giving me the third degree.

Dawn lobs a fresh incendiary at the western sea.

Is it arson if I stick a flare gun in my mouth and pull?

2. His Appeal to Ibn Arabi

Qur’an-ensconced, luminous Andalusian, lost, we are lost.

Lighthouse, shaykh of shore and shelter, it is worse than we feared.

White horses, Apache helicopters all lie buzzing blackly on the plain;

Who speaks for the hearts of Herat now, but zealots with scorpion-skittery beards?

Reason-frenzied, analytic mystic, first among the sane, hear our call.

Corral and break these riderless horses, and let love lead the qawwal.

3. In Praise of God’s Prose

It’s a quartz-filled geode cracked open, rhyming where its crystals catch the

light.

It has the weightlessness of rice photographed as the sieve tosses.

Hook me to an EEG while I listen to it, and the needle would swoop and

twitch the letters alif, lam, mim

And jig, and quiver, and slash, ecstatically seismic.

It’s the only liquor I allow myself.

The original, we are told, is in heaven, covered with a white cloth once used to

swaddle the infant Jibril.

This is the same Jibril who picked suns like berries and stomped them in a vat

when Allah asked for ink.

And you admire Nabokov?

We call it “prose,” but it is to prose as mathematics is to verse.

In some mouths, it sounds as if truth took flesh as music, and music in turn

took flesh as Arabic.

Some blame it for the explosions—but why not blame the ballpoint pen, too,

Emptied of its tube and spring, threaded with the detonator’s wire?

Even a flat page of it is an origami heron staring through the still pond of its being to the

bottom of desire.

The letters look like the seagulls I doodled in my schoolbooks having never seen the

sea.

The book in flight, the book in flames: Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Florida.

Under my tongue I hide the light, in my heart, the heat I’ve rescued from the fires.

4. Herat Harangue

Where there are no rhymes, I make do with thorns.

Because I have no running water, I drink from my cheek.

A rotor’s downdraft cut the flame off my wick, so I read by lightning and

blastflash.

The words I read are Allah’s; the eyes I read them with, a mammal’s.

When the mosque dome falls in, I will make do with my skull.

I own no screens, my imagination is my cinema.

The road wasn’t paved when they got here, it isn’t paved now that they’ve left.

By making do, I have made myself what I am: a maker in an unmade country,

a teacher of the forgotten.

When zealots set the young on fire, I bury my mind in crushed ice:

A transplant organ I am saving for the unborn.

When I was powerless to act, I made do with thought;

Now that I am powerless to think, I make music.

Because shrapnel popped all the drums,

I am beating the time on my chest,

A baited bear dancing with the spike through his foot.

______________

Amit Majmudar is an American novelist and poet. He is the author of the poetry collections What He Did in Solitary (2020); Dothead (2016); Heaven and Earth (2011), which poet A.E. Stallings chose for a Donald Justice Poetry Prize; and 0˚, 0˚ (2009), He lives in Dublin, Ohio, where he served as Ohio’s first poet laureate. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist.