Listen to Oliver Khan read his poem ‘Doubt’
At Maghrib, my elder brother mentions
to my father the callus on his forehead:
proof of my father’s eventual ascension
to heaven, he says, the angels have made
their mark. My father shakes his head
and says the spot is only from a lifetime
of prostration and nothing more. None had
marked him as he slept, or would trim
his sins away before the world’s grim
end. Of course no one marked you,
I said, of course it was made through
prostration. No angel would come
to allot the grace cradled within its palm.
Could an angel’s palm be anything but flame?
Oliver Khan is a poet of Pakistani descent who grew up in the American Midwest. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005. His poems have recently appeared in 3:AM, the Bangalore Review, the Breakwater Review, the Dewdrop, the Chicago Reader, and elsewhere.