Unbody

                    For Alia Ansari

My mother has started wearing the hijab again
on the anniversary of Alia’s death. Her murder

a cruel and trodden pilgrimage for all my people.
For this journey, I relinquish the body.

I was never there. Neither was my mother.
Instead, we are two October birds

dragged by our collars and flightless.
We predict the coming of rain,

which, too, has relinquished the body and pooled
into a shoebill’s halved cry: a ringing

gunshot. The instant
between a door slamming & its padlock & a blackened pistol

cocked from the earth’s insides.
It happens quickly. Aching talons uncouple

the clouds to cleave the earth
with a silver bullet, blood-hungry.

Here, the earth is not the earth
the same way a mother is not an orbed target, and the same way

her daughter cannot be a lucky witness, brought to that beaten cliff.
When she was found bloody and veiled, did you come

with questions or nocked arrows for blame: its own
scriptured body? Tell me why

the word hijab appears only twice in the Qur’an but is written
all over Alia’s body. She didn’t ask for this

remembering. Overhead, the last dove zips the sky closed.
I must confess: this memory is not about dying

but about a mother’s strength and dipping
into her wreckage. That she left this dunya a rustling

of feathers: glowing and everywhere.

*

Rukan Saif is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins University living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in The Penn Review and Furrow Magazine.