Edil Hassan

One’s-Self I Sing

In the Qur’an, poets are depicted as bewildering liars. Language—
an unlawful alchemy, a sinner’s sihr. On the one-on-one date
with God, I shout, Deny me an afterlife! I’ll just make a new one,
and horns sprout from my head. My mother, workshopping
her childhood, recalls stolen shillings and the emptied pockets
of nuns. What is removed are the entrails I could make a career of
if the DOD didn’t beat me to it. Historical amnesia as mood lighting. As every need
-based essay, diversity statement, and writing, I was the only
and never, I was made the only. On TV, the billionaire asks,
were you silent or were you silenced? My father, not knowing
what I know, is honeying the story of my birth.
He wasn’t there. He hates that he wasn’t there.
He asks, Do you remember who first held you? I answer,

Yes. I remember.
I remember.

Under the Tuscan Sun (2003): A Romance Interrupted

The waves in Italy…don’t eat everything— Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

In lieu of a break down, I buy a Tuscan villa
with what’s left of the alimony.
The keys I am given are old and because
I am a novelist, I imagine my past lives
as the generations that once lived in this house
and each one of them is white.
Citizenship goes unsaid; the visa process unsexy,
taxing, and therefore unworthy
of a plot line— unlike the man who will teach me
that after a lengthy divorce I can still orgasm.
He takes me to Rome— O Roma! I already miss
the Tuscan fields, where the olive trees are plucked
by Black hands that were plucked from the Mediterranean,
and from the road, don’t look like hands
at all, but like row after fragrant row
of gnarled branches. Love becomes me in this new city.
I am always radiant. My body, after all, a vessel
of history, but I dress it in white, cinched
at the waist, and no one says a thing.
I antique shop, never suspecting I could find
my skull behind glass, just another artifact, price tagged
and measured, among such fine china. He leaves me of course.
After all, we’d never survive it; not love or the hours
long drive between us, but the credits rolling.
I don’t shed a single tear (I’m lying, enough to flood the piazza).
Besides, there are many men to take his place, ballads of them.
Men, who will touch me, their hands staying hands,
and not blossoming into a rifle, or a colony
of ants— this is the pinnacle of romance, I’m sure.
Men, who tell me I have eyes they could drown in.
Men, who have never been left to die at sea. I want to
lie naked in their beds— my desire, simple
and ahistoric— and rename each place they kiss me
like conquered territory: Giorgio, Marcello,
Pietro, whose oiled lips at dinner
could make a blush cross Mary’s porcelain cheeks.

Heaven Is A Basement Party And No One Goes Home + Remix

            in honor of every basement:apartment:rented hall / in which my people have gathered homesick / homegone / let there longing to decorate / their limbs and let home be / found  in every song / let each body be a lyric to memorialize with a mouth

Hair a disco ball of smoke, I am fat-assed
and glorious. Here where the synth is sweeter
than Israfil’s trumpet, and a hand once having counted
loss can now be held in another, high up
and down below I break it down and break
a sweat. Silk soaked through and kohl in my eyes,
color running like a VHS tape rewinding.
Who needs vision when there is you— a vision.
Gold chained. God’s name. Afro a halo of oil
dripping down your neck. Beckoning me
with those hips as if your mother and my mother
weren’t in the corner planning the wedding.
As if one dance would not lead us to morning,
and the whole room made a witness to our demise.