Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. Her work appears in a variety of literary venues across quarter-ways of the globe, that can be accessed on her blog sheikha82.wordpress.com
Blue Dawn at Koh Samui
Drink me from a glass red dish
made from scars
when the stars un-assemble into
their obsidian cocoons
and the cerulean image of the sea
will pyramid the sky
and all of rain will have shaved
off the face
of its wet clouds, I will gather
to you like froth
and show you how my tumescent
bones danced
on that ferry rushing towards
a mistaken twilight
for it was the sun suspended
on bloodstone desire
for corals to leave the shores
and return to an embrace
where it would neither set
nor rise like a promise
of defiance, of superfluous
yearning and deeper destructions –
Fire at Koh Samui
The night breathed its walls in
as the trees carved fire
below where the lampposts
burned, the rain swept road
looked like a fallen obelisk,
his body towering over the frail
footed steps of her painted sun
on the waters that would grow
the horizon from its stones
and push the sky out of its deep
hide, if it would lead her out
and let the heat of her earth
singe the skin under which
his island was homed
there, discovered, would exist
a blemish rising out
from the joints of the sea
growing larger like the Kraken;
in his hands her mermaid body
torn and cast to the sky
One cannot write about shadows
against a hearth of dim fires;
the wood has prolonged its charring
taking time to simmer down to ash,
suffering resiliently, if you had
asked me for my body in exchange
for a body – like a sparrow’s wings
for a horse’s mane – I’d consider of
the wind in the cold hoping for land,
to be able to be a seed instead of a rain-
carrier, be nestled inside the woods
and bud as a leaf in the time of spring;
to be free from the fraught of past
echoes that find a strong back to ride
on stalks of light that cannot escape
their reflections; I would leave the need
of your hot breathing for the horse
if on its meagre wings of the sparrow’s
the winds of repine could take me
to graceful composures.
~Sheikha A
