Aria Aber, is an American poet, born 1991 to Afghan refugees, and raised in Germany.

 

 

 

 

AMERICA
Aria Aber

America the footsteps of  your ghosts are white stones weighting my center
 
America the old girls’ campus in the heart of Oakland where I teach
         Grows quiet as glass marbles rolling between my feet
 
I pick one up, I say It’s pretty
          And my students laugh, cheering Welcome to America
 
I have no one to look to this summer, I light a candle, burn the proposedly holy wood
 
And God does not come when summoned
 
Just the scent of   bonfire in my hair
Gold light flooding the bay window sure as a divination
 
America I divine nothing
 
In the other country, my parents wear their silence like silk robes each morning, devoted to the terrible sun
 
Day after day, I weep on the phone, saying  Even the classroom is a prison
          And still my father insists But it is good to become an American
 
And so I cement my semantics
I practice my pronunciations, I learn to say This country
         After saying I love
 
I rinse my aquiline face, wring my language for fear
 
I feared what had happened in your forest, the words that pursued the soft silk of spiders
 
The verbs were naturalize, charge, reside
The nouns were clematis, alien, hibiscus
 
America I arrived to inhabit the realm of  your language
         I came to worry your words
 
What you offered is a vintage apartment, an audience for poems
         Pills the color of dusk
         To swallow so as not to collapse when I read the poem about my uncle
 
The reading of  which I owe him, to everyone who antecedes me
 
No, I mean who haunts me
 
The haunting of  which is a voice
 
The West is too young to be haunted, an ex-lover assures
 
Still, every night I listen to your voice scraping against my walls
 
And in the mornings, trivial offerings on my pillows
          I pick the spiders from my bed, flush their curled transparence down the drain
 
America I don’t know what to make of  my ordinary cruelty
          Or my newly bourgeois pain
 
Venom lacing each crack of  the historic apartment
          Venom lacing the porcelain plates we hand out at parties
 
In the hallway I let someone touch me under my mask
          Three fingers in my mouth
          My back pushed against the door, the cold sink
 
The mind plays where it leads, a dark hour, the weight of a body on indigo tiles
 
America the scale says not thin enough
 
America my lawyer suggests to keep quiet about certain things
          About you and me
 
So I write in my notebook your name, I write Country of
Cowboys and Fame
 
America I have no cowboy
And I have no fame
 
All I gather is the scratching of ink against paper, the laugh of a skeptic
 
There are nights we hear something likened to fireworks lighting up the humid campus
And my students cheer, they laugh Welcome to America
 
Later in the empty corridor, the disembodied voice of my uncle
 
Saying        The classroom is not a prison
Saying        Go, go home now and so I go
 
Past vetiver and cedar, past eucalyptus declaring the shoreline
 
Until I shiver on the soft-stoned coast on which my father once lay
          And I proclaim what he did, I say This land is my  fate
 
America who am I becoming here with you
          If I wander the same as without you, barely visible amid your indigenous trees