from Take Me Home
Red Salvation
Allah, teach me how to hollow
my thighs into oars the color of mouths,
trade my stomach for a peach
pit soured like a fist. Soaked in edges
and red. My mother says red
is the holiest color. Color of language
and survival. Everything that
has touched our immigrant generation.
Like any good daughter,
I want to worship and be worshipped.
To heal and be healed.
Allah, teach me how to row away from
this brown body like a country,
swallow fistfuls of red in the dark
as sticks of incense. I imagine
here I am prayed to instead of preyed
upon. My body rooted in soil,
bone-deep, smelling like rain, instead of routed
to a white man and his doll-
houses, filled with girls who look
like me. Foreheads doused
in sweat and hijabs. If red holds all
Muslim daughters,
an island mothered by my people
let me go there.
Let me whittle the pieces
of my body that the man
has thrown away into a throne
big enough to fit
all the women in his dollhouses.
Take my cheeks
after he slaps them into stinging.
Take my breasts
and the way he calls them salty
samosas. Allah
teach me how to build a red
body from all this. To find
a valley languaged into respect,
ritualed into convocations
wearing burkas and skin flushed like apples.
Somewhere that
baptizes my people, moves us towards
you, Allah, like a seashore
to water. Like a landing, a blessing
that opens a rose,
holy enough to be home.
