Poems by Ashna Ali

DESCRIPTION
Screenshot of “In My Dreams I Write Letters to My Mother across the Ocean” by Ashna Ali, black text on white background, from Sun Dog Lit Website.

Poem Text:
Mother, shall I tell you about my unborn child,
forever a cluster of cells? You share a quality:

I shall write you both unsent letters
for the rest of my life. Marjorie suggests that it bobs

in cosmic storage. Not waiting, just available.
I can reach into the sky, pluck down the same fruit

that shines its light at me, only me. Soon I will go
under the knife. I will be opened so that I may never

be open. So that I may honor the distance
between my body and the bodies of stars, celebrate

constellation language. My acid evasion twinges the gut.
Tell you what. I will dig my arm into my big bag of secrets,

offer you a memory: I was a child with no skirt
to cling to. Those who found me doled out love in parts.

The kind that only the grown know costs too much.
Fills the body with false, palpitating promise of forgetting

that never, ever comes. You and me, we share a quality:
Nothing suffices. However closed, we are too ravenous

despite scar tissue across the mouth. Shall I tell you?
I have received a nudge of affection. A dropper’s worth of sleep.

I woke up with a vulva that speaks. I could tell you the joy
of the splay, of dark rush, but I am a child & will instead

haunt your house. I will watch my father, who offers his weight
each time his lips pry apart to say, “to my mind, that never happened.”

Watch: He, swallowing too hard with glasses slung low.
You and me, standing in separate doorways, together:

not looking.


ADDITIONAL METADATA
Subject(s): Ashna Ali
Type: Text
Language: English

PROVENANCE
Collection: Nureena Faruqi Fellowship Project
Item History: 2024-07-03 (created); 2024-08-13 (modified)

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