Queer Time 

Alone & needful, I read poems with one eye open, twiddling
my nipples in lamplight. Between them, I watch the hairs
on my thigh sway in the pankha’s low hum above me. Gradual

as Nani’s saree swelling on the clothesline in May,
or memory in the mindfield blinking just short of silence —
they sway their headless wicks, their spindly, black legs

as a flag sways, chest puffed, high upon the state tower;
as a fag sways, outside the bar, three blows from beaten clean
of breath & clear of tomorrows. I wear my outside clothes & walk

into my outside self. I wear a mask on my masks.
This has never been the difficult part. My people, well-
versed in the omission of truth as a survival of it. 

After Kemi Alabi

ξ

Ramadan 

Minaret in the morning
sky. My body — a blue mosque
for the kneeling, the folding,
then rising as though it is the prayer
itself. The light — blue and rising
into day, the day’s only bread
rising to my mouth. The hours
of this month always widening,
afternoon sun: a broken clock
on a blue wall. Desire rises inside me
to the crest of its flame, the summit
of your breast where blue begets
gold. Thirst is the body reciting
then receding, swallowing spit
when you are nowhere
to be touched. I dampen
at my corners the way memory
dampens with time passed. Parched,
I pass through you — a river
wending — blue.

ξ

Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet and artist from Bangalore, India. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a BA in Creative Writing in 2018. She was a 2018–2019 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, a 2018 Pushcart Prize Nominee, and winner of the 2018 Button Poetry Video Contest. Her poems find homes in places such as Vinyl Poetry and Prose, The Academy of American Poets, The Offing, The Shade Journal, DW B, and Apiary Magazine, among others. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is a poetry editor for The Spectacle magazine. She believes poetry is the closest translation and is sending love in your direction.