by Saadia Peerzada
First they took August away
and now September,
I eat a navel orange over the dustbin
so I can leave the kitchen clean.
Humidity welcomes October in this valley
of temperate seasons and temperate engagements.
Unlike Kashmir’s poplars, the trees here are mute,
their interlocutors snatched from them,
they are nearing hundreds of years of silence,
passed down like a family heirloom.
Autumn here, the elsewhere, feels false,
the colors not quite the right golden.
Saadia Peerzada is a poet from Kashmir. Her work appears in San Antonio Review, Inverse Journal and Rowayat online and in Salt Hill Journal, Critical Muslim, and Wanbli Ho Journal in print. Her poetry dwells on alienation and conditions of apartness. It tries to record images that chip away at human ossification.
