HAMAYLE SAEED - POEMS

Hamayle Saeed is an accidental physician and deliberate poet; moonlighting as an aspiring eponymous disease in Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Papercuts, Rough Cut Press and Amethyst Review. 

Cactus Moon
​

​I've learned to slobber over thorns
my tongue a careening mess
we were never meant for the
florals of firsts or the sap of
viscid love-laced stems,
blooms of a scarlet red.
Ours was a rickety terrain,
all hourglass sand & dune
with the occasional mirage
perched on a cactus moon. 

Godded
​

​I don't fetishize my holiness/but I try to knead the rosary so it twists/ like a noose on my finger/cut off blood supply long enough/flesh flails/does faith/are you lucky enough to be born into religion/or vowed to it/after/yours sincerely god/my god who came before me or the god I birthed after/some days I can't tell/pledge thyself and thy shall be/night inks the evening/waves permeate the air/compressions and rarefactions/physics studded with divinity/like a stone in a pond/ripples born/with the distance/an undulating death/the water is never the same for it/as is the air/some respond/most try/at least we try/we try/we have lived like this for long/but not long enough/my lord atop/my lord in the senses/my lord shining/everything and nothing all at once/his infinitude/my vicissitudes/my lord basked in praise/beset in my fear/not there but/always
 

Pseudo Erasure 
​

​I recently learned that a poet I revere is also an erasure artist. I could hardly make art of my own, let alone blank someone else's. White Bismol tablets, like the paint that still clogs the nostrils of my night. A deconstructed debility, the smell of ripe plums macerated on granite, you could serve me for dinner and I'd smile through the curettage. 3D printed jellies but the world is fickle and you are of the world, don't pretend you're better, if only you were better. Cut plastic rims before you discard them, lest you choke a life form already on its way out. Have your funeral and eat it too. Unsuspecting yellow eyes gawking, jellyfish dwindling in the duress of dire. Direly so you proclaim, this world is rot, have you no shame! All aplomb, none and yet all to blame. It chokes on oil, you burn in flame. It's all the same. 

​Tunnel Through Which The Light Shone in the Morning  
 

                                                     blighted ovum
                                                                        of  the night 
                                                                in  the 
                                                                            day 
                                                                                           the 
                                                                                                               sheets 
                                                 
                                                       bear no witness
                                                                              absolute
                                                                                       in creamy white

BIKINI WAXING
​

​ 
The blade licks me,
Oblong in its gifts of wax.
Like someone spreading jam
with all the time in the world.
And then the strip pulls away
With the desperation of a cannibal
I flinch in pain and perhaps,
feigned pleasure
Lord. When will I finally have sex?
 
I turn over or am turned
Ah, my ass, sunny side up
Wobbles with the weight of its weight
Even light suicides, plunged into this cratered unseeming.
Streaks of pearly cellulite
Glint with the defiance of
an experienced scarecrow.
No. Who will have sex with me?