Momina Mela

Momina Mela is a Pakistani poet from Lahore.

 

 

 

 

THE HEAD
Momina Mela

I dreamt I was holding my head in my hands and I told no one about it.I went for long walks, circling block after block, wondering why it fell off in     the first place.I secretly wished for someone to send me a sternly worded text message     saying:‘If you hadn’t left Pakistan, your head would still be in place.’Or transfer me a hundred dollars with a note reading:‘Your head wouldn’t have fallen off like that if you went for developmental     work.’My limbs wouldn’t know how to panic and I would begin to speak plainly     of love.When the doctor points at my uterus and ovaries on a screen, the head     nods.I take this as a sign of religious conditioning, some scripture that was read     in its ear.The head came first, then came lands of skin—assembling heat logic.I haul my body from the dirty dirty millennium. The jackpot is at $172     millionAnd I have never felt more away. Up there, heaven is busy pretendingNot to notice hell. Truly, the head does not care for the community gardenAnd even if it did it wouldn’t plant a single damn flower. 

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PRAYER IS BETTER THAN SLEEP
Momina Mela

And as to the poets — it is those straying in Evil that follow them:
Do you not see that they wander about bewildered in every valley?
And that they say what they practice not? — Qur’an 26:224–226

The man I confused Allah for speaks into the microphone while the angels on my shoulders chew a mouthful of my hair. I wake up to a severed goat head and look at it hard enough to remember the animal in its entirety, a functional thing. The Saudis have built skyscrapers taller than the mountains in Makkah. This is a sign of the apocalypse; we worry with our backs to each other and look for Isa in the faces of men who appear to spin gold straight from the guttural source. 
I repeat the word mustaqbil like a new prayer; when the dog barks at a brick wall mustaqbil, when anemones collapse back into gothic buds mustaqbil, when I wet my arms to my elbows in the sink mustaqbil. All while Israfil kicks his feet against a stone wall and cleans his trumpet with each utterance. In the village, three men dragged a boy into our orchards and beat him to a pulp. The woman who eloped was strangled and thrown into the river. Pickpockets robbed the mourners at my uncle’s funeral — mustaqbil mustaqbil mustaq — my throat is infected by the thick-tongued promise; each night diluted into its prior belly. I use language to build the gardens I’m destined to be expelled from, each imagined rose rendered true.