Afshan Shafi
The following poem, accompanied by Wahab Jaffer’s ink drawings, was first published in The Aleph Review, Vol. 1 (2017). Curated for the website by Alainah Aamir—our Digital Guest Editor (May 2023). Afshan Shafi is Poetry Editor at The Aleph Review.
As there are shades of yellow,
there are shades of girlhood-
some require a buttercup stain
from kink of pelt to lyre of foot,
some deem it best for
her profile to
be milky and frankly,
ruinous
some require a ‘dangerous mouth’
like Fitzgerald had
(according to Hemingway)
some insist that
the lean, reticulated
exclamations of her torso be legible,
others prefer
to traverse
an inexclamatory
phrase of sinew;
some require
a smooth gush of nape,
(a spit of land not meekly traded)
some require the sleek and wondrous
textile of her to be not unlike
a kind of molasses.
where one desires the july concertina
of her bruised and rambunctious aspect,
more than the manner of her manner
another insists on her
invocation to be bird-like
and not entirely amiable
some gloat over the tempered clime
of her hands,
those raspberry groves
some require their memory of her
to be oxidized, eerie
fixed in cameo of
fairest blue
some must fetch her
from her green and russet alcove
reading Chekhov
her eyes penitential
a scrubbed chin,
a half cup of copper
a shoulder with bliss on its curve
a knee of ash
flesh of
trodden moths
