Bismillah will you grant me the valleyed crevice ofsomething silver and scouredwith sound.I wander toward guilt, a young traveler looking for ruins,loving what I can,jagged with the narrow edge of all I do not, prayerlike bees in my mouth.Allah like tasbihs in my mouth.How many times have I opened myself up to God?The deer have returned from their rivering, my tongueis sanded down by the languageof you, so what is left?The wind, the wind, the wind… thirty-three timesthe bead flickslike the ki ki kiof a Northern bird. How it howls throughmy skin into a landscape of wild hives—What is left has no holy. A nameless bone, frayedand twinning into the moss.Not unlike undoing the seam of a wound to find a country,every du’a a deep cut, every recitation its blood.What is left has no Allah beyond the vineyardof memory—Again and again, the wind.Merciful Allah grant me forgiveness, if anything.
Another Last Prayer
Feature Date
- May 10, 2020
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Copyright © 2019 by Alycia Pirmohamed
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon, and she is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying poetry written by second-generation immigrant authors. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, The Fiddlehead, The Adroit Journal, The London Magazine, Room Magazine, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and others. Alycia is the author of the chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind (forthcoming, BOAAT Press), and the winner of the 2018 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest in poetry. She currently reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal.
Vol. 37, No. 2
Tallahassee, Florida
Florida State University
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Laura Biagi
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Amanda Hadlock
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The Southeast Review, established in 1979 as Sundog, is a national literary magazine housed in the English department at Florida State University, edited and managed by graduate students. Our mission is to present emerging writers on the same stage as well-established ones. We publish literary fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, interviews, and art across our biannual print issues and online. With nearly sixty members on our editorial staff who come from throughout the country and around the world, we publish work that is representative of our diverse interests and aesthetics, and we celebrate the eclectic mix this produces.
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