ISSUE THREE – AUTUMN 2024

exit earth

by Ammara Younas

what do you do with the corpse of a man against heaven? it won't be buried the dirt coughing up darkness while the body peels & peels & it won't be burnt while they look the other way the being icarusing & soul losing rhyme but becoming a poem reaching reaching m u k t i is it: propelled out of stillness into the thin air? a driverless rickshaw gauging the limits of dimensions a patrol of birds trailing its tail flown by the power politics at play in god stations on earth, you must pick a god to play the game does it then get humiliated in the heavenly bazaar claimed by not even a stone-faced black hole? so it goes floating in space the presentlessness futurelessness pastlessness hold hands in a melodramatic cosmic dance those tear-bursting fantasists ever believing in God's mercy but does it ever come? (on earth, you must pick a god before you close your eyes) but when on earth, the rolling hills roll over themselves when the wars pluck bodies from spirits like the mechanical hands of god, and when you pluck them too from the ditches they were set free in from the called-for cold of consciousness and the fleeting warmth of religion, what do you see etched in the upturned veins of the phantoms? when you run out of words what do you see spelled out, drawn in, or growing unbidden: a fertile crescent with her own star, a T-drop, a cross, two equilateral triangles fighting for equal territory, or something long-forgotten? what do you see for miles and miles, years ossified, your eyes fossilized? nothing to see there but the blood and dirt coughing up bloom after bloom you'd rather not see eyes shut like an impulse, you'll pluck them out and the dead…well, the dead never learned to speak the language of the living you'll just hand them a god before burying
1 Ammara Younas

Ammara Younas is a poet from Gujranwala. She enjoys reading speculative fiction, and writing stories and poems on myth and magic.

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