A Coin Over Each Eye

by Amrita Noor

Jen Theodore

silence, and incense shoots an arrow straight through. angel & i sit in the sweet -grass, searching for signs of life: birdsong, maybe. a swollen teat for suckling. here, palms suckle on the sun while we sleep; organs burst from bodies lest the knife escape questioning. of knives, Shahid writes, on knives. his Urdu balmed then bloodied. at its end, a gazelle cried to the Lord above &| for its piety was granted the curse of poetry. the official account is this: each angel fucked by the Lord above & on every earth, memory slicks saltwater with its leaving. if Shahid hacked the couplet to bones, let my sin be its leavening: familiar tongue again led to the slaughter, skinned like the lamb Judas once dared love. the intent of the gesture: to search for life; not to harm. a cow larded the blade for fattening. uncomfortable truth: angel & i’s silence betrays its own universal geometry. Lord, some nights, i am afraid some- thing dead will crawl into me & to touch its ache will be to be touched back in infinities. to construct a mouth is to carry infinity: the throaty howl of a monsoon, milk flicked nipple to nipple. the dark after dark. the roof of my mouth, perpendicular to its desire. thick and heavy above the hot core of the earth, i stole a glance. conjugated the blood of my butcher’s knife. considered how everything began. considered how i began: everything remembering everything.

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Amrita Noor was born in Ludhiana, Punjab. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, Poetry Society, The Shore, and more. Someday, she will be able to write in every language in which she dreams.