That One Time I Stayed Up All Night Making Excuses to Talk to Danger
08/23/23 Writer’s Lab Invocation Poet, Tarfia Faizullah
That One Time I Stayed Up All Night Making Excuses to Talk to Danger
By Tarfia Faizullah
Maybe it was my old friend Fascination
who first let me know that Danger
was right across the hall, or maybe
it was the unrealized absence of pollen, or,
was it the nearness, Danger, of your hair’s
blatant softness, just toweled.
Or, I wanted to stop thinking — and, I wanted to ask,
Do you think God understands
attraction? Surely, right?
Or, I wanted you to notice my anger,
which you might not characterize as dangerous, per se,
but rather, fickle, a synonym
for “mercurial.” Maybe that’s typical. Yup,
there is a liquid sharpness in me I wouldn’t unlid
except ... damn, Danger,
there’s this certain way you draw out epiphany ...
You’re messy, Danger,
baby, meaning untidy, confusing, monumental,
great in size, and also, of or serving
as a monument, which leads me to reconsider
the dimensions of sandwiches, as well as apartheid,
the aphid, and the scarab beetle.
Danger, can you feel
me tremble?
But I am saying nothing, dear
Danger, you don’t already
know — you’re used to being pursued
with rage, unwanted advice, riddles. That’s not me,
respectfully — Joy is always waiting
to cyclone you with nothing more
than a matchbook,
a long gaze, a warm bowl.
Tarfia Faizullah
“I am chosen, I prayed, I was born. I took a right, a left, and another left. I'm sometimes late, but I do love to run a palm all alone around the shining altar. I still believe I could be, like y'all said, anything I wanted.”
― Registers of Illuminated Villages: Poems.
Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas. She is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf, 2018) and Seam (SIU, 2014). Her writing has appeared widely in the US and abroad in the Daily Star, BuzzFeed, Hindu Business Line, Huffington Post, Ms. magazine, the New Republic, the Nation,
Oxford American, Poetry magazine, and the Academy of American Poets website, as well as in the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019) and the television show PBS News Hour.
The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, Faizullah presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and has been featured at the the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Fulbright Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, the Radcliffe Seminars, New York University, Barnard College, University of California Berkeley, the Poetry Foundation, the Clinton School of Public Service, Brac University, and elsewhere.
Faizullah’s writing has been translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and was included in the theater production Birangona: Women of War. Her collaborations include photographers, producers, composers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists, resulting in several interdisciplinary projects, including an EP, Eat More Mango. In 2016, Harvard Law School included Faizullah in their list of 50 Women Inspiring Change.
www.tfaizullah.com
