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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Far Travels SOFIA MEMON _____________________________ Barely It’s just like Katie said: most people belong in the foyer and no more and others belong in the kitchen (maybe on a stool sipping tea) but no more and a few others belong in the living room in a t-shirt and jeans reading the paper. But there are a very very few barely any or maybe none at all that ought to come all the way in to see the photographs by the bed or the way your nightdress is hung on a door peg, look out into the back garden (which you planted in slivers of spring hoping that a few where barely any or maybe none at all would become alive.) [415]
Second Street Libre Parked on second street, avoiding the rabid meter thieves mine is ‘Out of Order.’ Outside of Cuba Libre from what I wonder? Remembering fondly Fidel’s offer to come help us with our struggling electoral system. Free from long nights of courtyard musicians, no cover (all of Trinidad de Cuba swaying) or free from a neighborhood politics more sophisticated than Congress, speech more beautiful, more credible than here? [416]
All Regret all regret for the wars I’ve started: remember? I left, car full like we had seven years of stationary bike and I was a wheel loosened with momentum and righteousness now an old kook I ask forgiveness like a blue hair with twine woven clacking prayer beads except I know I’ve done more damage I used to say regret was a stupid emotion goes to show what I knew goes to show how slow I learned needed special ed for well meaning leftists remedial revolutionary turned reformist to pay off student loans I can feel my lungs wider now a little at a time should I tell you how scrubbing bathroom tiles seems to increase my capacity for self examination? a yellow scrub pad, standard white toilet brush, Comet, the sound of running water a little Baptismal daydream [417]
Ceramics: Courses at Intervals 1. Deposited in your lap for the fortieth time, I am counting the years before revelation in days of gifted grace. I asked for your intervention before I knew you, rascal smiled. Once Uzma likened you to the bartender at the tavern of a better delerium. I am not afraid; there was no language for hunger in my former country. Yearning there, I had selected potent powerful, hyperbolic words like good and just and kind. I carefully fragmented the word love into three hundred arched syllables and made mosaics the color of sky at Saint Catherine’s monastery. 2. Migration does everything we could not. My pathway is now the grout between bathroom tile and soap dish. I wear scour pads on my feet; it is wider than a highway to navigate carrying my lumberjack ego but it is otherwise clear, Mediterranean. So far I have learned: one cannot start a war in the washroom— everyone dissolves here. [418]
3. These are days like blue celadon; somewhat thin, translucent but never transparent, like the companionship of a Teacher who already felt loved and left and loved and left—like Her skin can’t cover the seduction of devotion. It is Her shape underneath, the curve of a bowl well set, but see how the form is on the inside, emptied full and even. [419]
Poems Poems are where you are not; where I examine the light in the leaves or the Yogi teabag wisdom to my heart’s content without ever turning my attention outward. Poems are where alchemy is unquestioned and love unrationed, where the soldiers in wars started by misers find themselves suddenly in prayer shawls ill-fitting or not, over still muddy combat boots feeling a sudden and surprising calm spread over their faces, involuntary and embarrassing like incontinence. Poems promise everything you’ve grown out of will be returned to you washed out, dried on the line scented in lavender if only you’d give up and give in give away even the lint from your pockets and start again and again and again every morning. Poems are fearless when they can afford to be, say everything we could not make the elegant argument that, lacking citation and polemic is nonetheless persuasive; maybe because poems, like mirrors demand that we approach with hands folded awareness that we are asking for everything we are not yet. [420]
Sofia Memon lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she practices law in the areas of public benefits and language access. She received her B.A. from New College of Florida in 1996 and her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law in 2000. Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, and raised in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, she is a second generation Pakistani American. |
