OCTOBERS: Poems
Longlist Finalist, 2023 Julie Suk Award

OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language—as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.
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OCTOBERS: Poems
Longlist Finalist, 2023 Julie Suk Award

OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language—as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.
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OCTOBERS: Poems

OCTOBERS: Poems

by Sahar Muradi
OCTOBERS: Poems

OCTOBERS: Poems

by Sahar Muradi

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Overview

Longlist Finalist, 2023 Julie Suk Award

OCTOBERS traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language—as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822967088
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date: 10/10/2023
Series: Pitt Poetry Series
Pages: 120
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Sahar Muradi is author of the chapbooks [ G A T E S ], A Garden Beyond My Hand, and Ask Hafiz: A Migration Story Told through Poetic Divination. She is coeditor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature and EMERGENC(Y): Writing Afghan Lives beyond the Forever War: An Anthology of Writing from Afghanistan and Its Diaspora, and coauthor of A Ritual in X Movements. She is a recipient of the Stacy Doris Memorial Poetry Award and the Patrons’ Prize for Emerging Writers from Thornwillow Press, as well as a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Sahar is cofounder of the Afghan American Artists & Writers Association and dearly believes in the bottom of the rice pot.

Read an Excerpt

washee/was she 

 

she was washee i told her you are 

like your motherland a wilderness 

needs a belt laid down two white  

hotel towels took her into the tub to 

wudu the boys out of her mouth pointed 

her nipples toward qibla wiped clean 

her intention to perform ruk’u as if 

carrying a glass of chai on her back 

fold at the knees palms to the ground 

tucked her soles under her astaghfirullah  

used country 

 

in my used country I felt his teeth 

circle as a mosquito the black mystery 

he placed my right hand over my wrong 

stain said he was bringing me home 

offered me a suite with a lock a key in 

the shape of a brother perhaps twenty- 

two years old my body pure as a glass 

table he spilled was she my boss on my 

back at night came easy as a fly  

to post-conflict faithfully   

used my country 

 

 

Grasping 

 

Time, I am leaning into you 

pushing all my chips to your corners. 

Here in the grief of my hands, 

in the elegies of grasping, 

remind me how useful it was, 

the arrow. 

 

Lessons of infancy: 

When he leaves the room, 

he does not exist. 

If I am hungry, 

I am permitted to wail. 

And above my head, the mobile. 

What finer constellations outside myself. 

 

Echoes are inevitable. 

The long space behind my body, 

the tall stem of day hissing through the clock, 

avoiding the gaps. 

What does it mean to live in the gaps, 

in the places where it is groundless, 

to be so open  

to this one morning with its distinct wink? 

 

Something about surrender. 

At dawn, a pledge of white flags. 

Turning over what I cannot hold: 

a library of nouns. 

What courage it takes to admit one’s size, 

to polish the day over and over 

grasping nothing. 

 

 

 

 

counterparts 

 

not all fear can be worked through 

the ocean’s example, constantly emptying 

 

the nasturtiums, she instructed me, were edible 

we ate the leaf, then the flower 

 

despite his clouds, he believes in life 

how we tire of one another’s othering 

 

I count the blessings  

to keep from hurting him 

 

the day circles  

as a mosquito 

 

when they lifted the cloth 

I saw one that was not you 

 

stood in my own corridor  

and remarked the lack of windows 

 

but I preferred to continually peel the orange and reject the fruit 

wouldn’t it taste of heartbreak 

 

I was invited to take flight into the red road 

to place my palm on the rock that formed the scripture 

 

grief being vital 

its violence being necessary 

 

I rub the shadows 

even in the garden 

 

the prison of living by conviction 

so many prisons 

 

I will move more slowly 

and it will still be a move 

 

eyes of little night 

and so, aching 

 

his voice high-pitched and proving himself 

back into my own body, eyes 

 

I believe in doom and all its sister griefs 

I believe in my thoughts reducing me to negligible  

 

I believe in the words that I make up to color myself 

we may not like you, but we love you in a very special way 

 

embarrassed of my lines that grow out of ether  

and die in ether 

 

feel the light shrink 

the breath small 

 

may you inch in the direction of trust 

hold the tail of your instinct 

 

may you fail and get up to see  

you did not die 

 

may you expose your poems to the u/v 

to the later atmospheres of your own doubt 

 

arrive with the bow taut, and he notices 

asks if it’s pointed at him 

 

i learned from my mother who left mines all across the house 

the point was to startle us into guilt 

 

imagine the future 

as if your narrow divination could ever know 

 

he and you will be two parallel lines 

never touching 

 

he will not leave 

and you will punish him for that 

 

what are the ways I try to be free 

I wondered against the clock 

 

a kind of life that is not certain  

but alive 

 

she spoke of fundamentalism  

as the understandable reaction to capitalist consumerism 

 

toys don’t satisfy the question  

why am I here 

 

I look for another answer 

my answer is * 

 

how to make perfect? 

seal every corner? edge god out? 

 

the gnarled root of time 

I touched it; it did not speak 

 

The problem was always 

trying to explain my face to everyone 

 

here is my will: bright as a firecracker 

here is his will: brighter 

 

in the eye, notice the lake 

in the lake, behold the sunken boats  

 

in the boats are worms gnawing on the past  

at the bottom of the past is the solid earth  

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