I place my head carefully
and a thousand acres of zaatar
descend with me.
Here there’s a reservoir
of soil just for us, tucked away
on the other side of your chest.
The beating in my ears
coming from a beyond-place
of worry catching up to love, somewhere
on the other side of your chest,
is like footsteps ringing on the ground
after a Baloch women’s march.
Carefree, I forget about wudu
and drench this earth in
everything I refused to shed
back home.
I’m a drummer out of practice
when I’m wandering the beyond-place,
a damp dharkan antheming
me home. I sink into strange
soils and forget to grow back again.
Precarious unisons, missions,
precious unions fill my eyes with
the smoke of air strikes and I
smell mustard in the wind rising
from the other side of your chest.
The rigor trapped in your epidermal
craters remains undisturbed
while monsoon rages its thunder
on my skin.
My soul sings
back to the rivers that flood
into your arteries and revives
lands flattened by giants. I walk back
to see echoes of life rooted there:
beating, pulsing, pounding, aching
on the other side of your chest.
Mekyle Ali Qadir is an aspiring poet of Pakistani origin. He is based in Ottawa and is pursuing his master’s degree in English at Carleton University. A major source of his inspiration is the negotiation of culture and ethnicity he enacts in his life as an immigrant from Pakistan. He cultivated his interests from contrasting and inharmonious arenas, but the common thread running through them has been writing and art, culminating in a poetic voice that echoes diasporic journeys and diverse traditions.
