Brutish tongue in both; I’ve caught
myself as a wildness. The injured
frog cried part eye, part skin
in its recognition. Asking to be healed,
I too am amphibian song,
the dark field. The heart’s regeneration
in all its impossible unfoldings without
an ambit. My mind lives in these
twin skins returned: how slow
this wheel, the kinetic fluid nest
of salamander eggs floating on
like a lone cloud above the mountain, I cup
in the shape of a prayer. A body
of water, once polluted. Reverted back
with the unruly sky into clarity
through mycological regeneration.
How will you heal me?
asks the widow; the spider ashed
in a shooed corner, the nirvana
of teeth among other teeth. The unloved
hounds at the ankles of the saint after
being trapped and poisoned. Let me pretend
I believe in something. A miracle:
the discovery of a species of bird
that makes garlands out of thorns.
It is not enough for me to become
a believer. What will be enough?
The belly-up fish turned back
to abandoned bluegrass femur-long.
How Kali is an ecologist: creation
and destruction. More limbs
repopulate and continue
into a mother of thousands.
No matter what prayer you answer.
Here are the cycles of remaking—
my patch of red and sour feral
strawberries. Each a different size
of my finger.
Jai Hamid Bashir’s work has recently appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Adroit Journal, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, and others. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize and Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize and been included in the Best of the Net anthology.
