“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”  
— June Jordan 

Samandar Ghaus is a Pakistani-American poet, gardener, and community organizer currently working on an MFA at Indiana University. They are a VONA/Voices of Our Nation fellow, a Tin House workshop alum, and the recipient of the 2020 Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize. Their work can be found on poets.org, Poetry Daily, and poiesis, and they currently serve as Poetry Editor for Indiana Review.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romaye Rubinas Dorsey. Saami, what poems have you brought for us today?

~COMING OUT DAY~

and because this is the gay

agenda — me teaching kat

how to make my mother’s kichidi,

while my mother is at home

three thousand miles away, without me,

and i mean really without me,

because we haven’t spoken

in almost five months,

five months of us living/dying

without one another — (she’s getting old,

and so am i (almost thirty, still baby

queer)) — and i missed her birthday,

and her wedding anniversary, and i should

say it’s been five months without

my dad, too, but i haven’t missed his birthday yet

(it’s coming up at the end of october) —

i think we must be breaking up, constantly,

like the old phone cards we’d use

to call family in pakistan — meaning,

not breaking up with family, but breaking

towards family, like how every sort-of-desperate hello?

HELLO? yelled into the phone line

was one more shot at coming together,

which is that queer magic of conjuring being

born, every other minute of conversation

and every day of our lives, into the possibility

of family, another mama-papa

with whom we might find our bloodlines

entangled, even if the mama-papa is our age

and it would be literally impossible

for them to be our parents in any extant universe —

and i mean, kat and i share the blood

of tomatoes we ate in the chutney

we made last night (my mother’s shadow

on the stovetop, gently melting the onions

into ghostly translucence) and now i’m crying

into the reheated kichidi the next day,

even though every one of us is enough

and together we can be enough

for each other — this i want to believe, that your

ringed hands and your wind-washed brown curls,

and you, over there, your oven-warm freckled body

are genetics enough to spite this whole system, and i wonder

what my mother is doing, whether she is

touching the roses outside the kitchen

window, and if she imagines their pink

petals to be the skin of my cheek,

or if she tastes my uncertainty

from her sure hand, scattering cumin

at the bottom of a pot; I imagine her sobbing

with my father over a handful of yard-long beans,

the seeds for which I had given her a year ago,

crying the same way I do these days,

when the light is just right or the nightmare

too poignant or the couch gives way just so

to the weight of my body, the way hers once did

when i lived inside it and the way hers refused to

when i cried to her I’M GAY and then, silently

to myself, OH GOD [FUCK —]

that was a silent june between us and these days i sing

almost every day; my family is now an album, a record

of memories i can replay on any tuesday

afternoon — what a thing, choice — and this

could be the gay agenda, my body musicking

itself into the atmospheric chaos, despite all —

and my mother doesn’t know i can sing (pretty

decently) but i imagine her tinny high-pitched

voice just a little off-key drifting

through her house like a memory

of me (does she sing now that i’m gone?)

and i wonder if this is her

happiness, if this is her freedom, and if she feels

sure as the granite countertop holding up

her coffee cup this inevitable morning,

if she feels like a stone

in her knowing and her no —

i mean, it’s ~national coming out day~

and i’m alone in my house crying

over microwaved kichidi, which

i’m going to eat with several hefty spoonfuls

of yogurt given to me for free on saturday

by lauren who heard me talk

about my stomach ulcer and my next

unfunded MFA summer and said

take everything you need

from the farmers market table

she was manning, conducting

an orchestra of generosity, and this

should be the gay agenda, trauma-flavored

kichidi in the same bowl as kat’s

sweet laugh and lauren’s masked-but-still-vigorous hug,

and me sobbing in the kitchen when wendy texts me “love u”

because fuck [i hate] this day, and also i love today, i love u mom, how’s the weather,

here it’s raining outside

and the lightning is as long as my life

and just as brief

and just as bright, can’t u see?

You've been listening to the poetry of Samandar Ghaus on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.