Tarfia Faizullah > Quotes

“I am chosen, I prayed, I was born. I took a right, a left, and another left. I'm sometimes late, but I do love to run a palm all alone around the shining altar. I still believe I could be, like y'all said, anything I wanted.”
― Tarfia Faizullah, Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems

“Yeah, I did that. Snuck off to unwrap my own morals: for a card to call a boy in another state who didn't want me, rings that gave my knuckles grass-colored scars, and a diary to carry my aches in.”
― Tarfia Faizullah, Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems

“Somewhere in this insomniac night / my life is beginning / without me.”
― Tarfia Faizullah, Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems

“Aubade Ending with the Death of a Mosquito"

—at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka

Let me break
free of these lace-frail
lilac fingers disrobing
the black sky
from the windows of this
room, I sit helpless, waiting,
silent—sister,
because you drew from me
the coil of red twine: loneliness—
spooled inside—
once, I wanted to say one
true thing, as in, I want more
in this life,
or, the sky is hurt, a blue vessel—
we pass through each other,
like weary
sweepers haunting through glass
doors, arcing across gray floors
faint trails
of dust we leave behind—he
touches my hand, waits for me
to clutch back
while mosquitoes rise like smoke
from this cold marble floor,
from altars,
seeking the blood still humming
in our unsaved bodies—he sighs,
I make a fist,
I kill this one leaving raw
kisses raised on our bare necks—
because I woke
alone in the myth of one life, I will
myself into another—how strange,
to witness
nameless, the tangled shape
our blood makes across us,
my open palm.”
― Tarfia Faizullah, Seam

“I worry that my friends
will misunderstand my silence
as a lack of love, or interest, instead
of a tent city built for my own mind”
― Tarfia Faizullah

“Do you hear an echo? As in, nymph of rock and ravine cursed to endlessly repeat the voice of another. As in, I can't help but speak for fear the voice I'll hear is my own.”
― Tarfia Faizullah, Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems

“Self-Portrait as Mango

She says, Your English is great! How long have you been in our country?

I say, Suck on a mango, bitch, since that’s all you think I eat anyway. Mangoes

are what margins like me know everything about, right? Doesn’t
a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isn’t a mango

a placeholder in a poem folded with burkas? But this one,
the one I’m going to slice and serve down her throat, is a mango

that remembers jungles jagged with insects, the river’s darker thirst.
This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango

that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months
per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds. Why use a mango

to beat her perplexed? Why not a coconut? Because this “exotic” fruit
won’t be cracked open to reveal whiteness to you. This mango

isn’t alien just because of its gold-green bloodline. I know
I’m worth waiting for. I want to be kneaded for ripeness. Mango:

my own sunset-skinned heart waiting to be held and peeled, mango
I suck open with teeth. Tappai! This is the only way to eat a mango.”
― Tarfia Faizullah