Aesthetic Statement

I asked my grandmother to tell me about the war and instead she reached into her mouth and
took out her teeth.

That is to say: I did not have a uterus until it fell out, into my hands, in the shower.

It is not the job of the poem to remember the color of water.

A scholar asks me what my contributions are to the postcolonial and I tell them that I was a
child-bride.

What if my history refuses the poem entrance?

As a child, I only wrote diary entries on scraps of paper after each beating. My mother would
find each scrap and laugh at me.

Now I take my father’s arrest affidavit and underline the sentence about my mother’s 911 call,
how she was more than likely misheard while she was sobbing.

It is the duty of the wife to close the container of herself in the face of desire.

If I could see my husband again, I just want to ask him: where on the body is the best place to
hold a woman down during an exorcism?

I know I must prepare for the future.

I never smile at the Muslim passengers. I don’t want them to get too comfortable, my father says,
the former apostle of god turned TSA officer, always the oppressor.

No, my family is no longer religious, they’re just cruel.

Ten years ago, on FaceTime with the head prophet, he told my mother that a jinn stood at my
right shoulder. When I gasped, he smiled at me and asked, Who taught you how to understand
Bangla?

My mother was another man’s wife before she was my mother. Silence is a learned language, I
want to tell him, ten years later.

As a former mother myself, it is my duty to give my daughter a life within the poem. A part of
me is glad she is dead. Her body remains.

In one of my earliest memories, I had fallen down the stairs and looked up from the landing to
see my father carefully placing his mug of hot tea on a step before coming to get me.

It is one of my safest memories.

Liars make poetry out of us.

Liars make poems out of people.

—————

The Zuihitsu Addresses Herself in Second Person

When your house first burns down, everyone but a dog will survive.
You will survey the wreckage, years later, the body clean and charred, the bones white and waiting, and find
nothing but dolls in the backyard. All their faces are melted. All their limbs are gone.
I want to warn you—this telling is not easy.
In the ancient world, childdolls were linked to fertility. They were often tied hanging to
trees to encourage harvest. In Attica, swinging dolls were thought to either drive away
demons, or to keep them.
There is always some god involved. This is not about them.
When your father rebuilds the house one night, he will sit in front of the television, eating
and lonely. At one point the power will go out. A woman will crawl out of the screen, wings reaching.
Even now there is a darkness encroaching as you write this. A specter flickering in the
hallway.
Nowadays I spend entire mornings sleeping and waking. I dream of a woman scooping
out the cup of uterus from my body. The woman always spills it. The cup is always
empty.
I digress. I want to be honest.
I am considering what it means to become the memory.
When I was still little, my family thought they were all prophets. My cousin thought he
was Jesus. My aunt thought she was Mary. We lived for some years this way.
They made me be a wife.
What I remember best about their house was that it was doused in red. It was windowless.
What does it mean when a history has no bodies remaining?
The mint plant in the window of your new home is alive. She overlooks your desk, arms
reaching. You love her like a child. Her limbs move everyday, growing closer.
I talk to my friends about location, how some places seem to have their own bodies, their
own spirits, walking. I want to believe it. I wish I could.
You tell me: is a home not too a body?
In your dreams your dead daughter begs you to tell her a story. Every time you open your
mouth, she covers your eyes. Tell it blindly.
There is an Alpine legend about a doll who becomes alive, the sennentuntschi. The
herdsmen who make her out of rags are lonely and mean. They fold her. They take turns.
One night, she begins to speak. She picks one of the men to stay with her, and the rest of
them must leave. When they do, they see the skin of the man left behind stretched out
onto the roof. The doll watches them, laughing.
A cult is only a cult once survived.
You want to know if I know anger. I only know vessel.
They will find an ancient model of the sennentuntschi, in Switzerland, in the Calanca
valley. It would be acquired in 1978 from one of the residents, having been discovered
buried somewhere beneath a house or a basement. The residents refuse to speak of it.
The doll has a prominent vaginal opening and breasts.
What good is a cup if not for libations?
When you miscarry you can feel the house in the bathroom with you, seething. You will
bury the dolls and your baby in the yard, side-by-side.
Inside, the mint is stretching. Outside, a dog is walking.
The truth is this: no history really buries.
I wish I could hold you. I wish I could tell you what’s coming.

—————

Lydia Abedeen is a poet from Orlando, FL. She is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's PhD program, and a graduate of the Northwestern Litowitz MFA+MA Creative Writing Graduate Program. A 2021 Tin House Scholar and Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets Fellow, her writing has been supported by the University of Iowa, SAFTA, and The Watering Hole. Her poetry can be found in The Rumpus, The Margins, Mizna, and other places. She is a religious cult survivor.