By: Pınar Yaşar
i entered into this contract
with a biological agent, not
knowing how long we would
be wed, certain that the divorce
rates in America were a good
indicator of our tryst, most of
myself already given up to
this country of thieves and
missionaries (is/there/a/difference),
why won’t this just give up too?
i wait, i lose count, i remember,
he drives me there this time
because last time i called on God
instead to accompany me, a sightless
unseen God that no phlebotomist
can avoid when taking from the vein,
when will my thoughts grow tired?
isn’t exhaustion what i was promised?
he doesn’t have an answer, i knew
he wouldn’t, he tries to make a song
out of the whirring we both know, that
lover’s incantation that started it all,
most Top 40 songs in this country fit
like a sterile glove, better than i fit
in this room
with all of my excess
spilling out of the port,
he will be pushed back from the force
of my grief, i have seen it before,
no cake today (the baker is on a different
cycle, but sometimes we overlap),
i imagine the peanut butter and jelly pie
on my lap instead of blood results,
why do they weigh the same?
the song still bops, whirring/stirring/rotting
the rest of my body (but it’s for my own good)
(it’s for the parts of me that think too much,
act too much, feel too much, fight too much)
i lost track of the original papers, but one day,
when i find them, i will dream of a cure, pluck
at the vague language and accuse, accuse, accuse
no one but myself for letting this body
wait for God while I was there all along.
Pınar Yaşar is a Boston-based Kurdish diaspora writer, poet, and instructor. She holds a degree in English Literature from Tufts University and, while there, was published in the Tufts Cannon Literary Magazine. Her work also appears in La Bruja Roja, Cyberhex Press, and Haverthron Press.
"Most of my poems, like me, are political. I write about the Kurdish diaspora. This puts my safety at risk, in ways a simple google search can illuminate should you task yourself (and you really should). But this poem is a different kind of danger I expose myself to. It is an honest peek into what it feels like, for me, to be on immunosuppressive chemotherapy. It is an ongoing experience, and my body and I are 7 years deep in the trenches, fighting and emerging. This poem is also unlike my usual style, as I shy away from narrative form. It was written in a single sitting, it was not edited at all, and I lay victim to its existence. Willingly. This poem is, at its core, a choice; one I would make over and over again."
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