ISSUE TEN | SPRING 2018
Mira as Garganta Rroma – II
The English thesaurus still enlists the term “to gyp” as an acceptable synonym for “to cheat”. To gyp is a derogatory term for Rroma/Romani peoples who are often slurred as “gypsies” and portrayed as tricksters or common thieves to date.
Our bodies are still averaged / to gyp / as in this brassy
malingerer – as in shank out my own spine to bounty
your pilgrim’s haunting. Father of stubborn oak & hobo
spiders. His bulerías choiring their own doxology All that
hunger sniffing dank the stray steel vessel of Romanipen
Tally us in your most turbulent animals – Awaken the iron!
Pray the baleen kisses back the shipwreck of your veloured
blue-solace. Number us amongst your sunken mercenaries
your paltry waters reminiscing our last superstitions in the error
of each syrinx. I am a woman only between the teeth of those
who have eaten the rest of this story Have forgotten the harvest
moon & its ram her cloven headlock her lustrous passing
Bear with me my tangled Seraphic my abyss-throated aubade
My Dire won’t acquiesce to your masterly sizing. Beware of
not what the Gypsy curses to sleep into your dark ground
but what She can cure back from its quiet dirt
Hope: A Self-Help Manual (GodBot)
(This is a found poem cobbled from posts by a Markov text chain generator program for a poetry bot on tumblr. In a way, this is “botting” the bot because the original bot uses an underlying code to put together prose poems from spotlighted tumblr blogs)
walk into a knot of shrunken features Your person spewed
through phone earpieces we could shudder with the data
I’m like everybody else desi coiling nested personae endless
Gods the aviaries of my stomach glowed on his desktop
withdrew rags coated in a watermelon nighttime my Thing I love
with each insufferable elsewhere late into the snow the leaf
already aware of a whim a waiting room glühwein a ball of
dryer lint glacier fire hell has always been self-conscious about
the precise thin white scars that chisel away at a day’s blue statue
you couldn’t bear the clouds in school or moons between our
emergency kits He had the softest rabbits for a smile & I cocooned
in “protocols” the bloody covering of the week-end having reached
my black embroidered housedress while I flake off like a cold war
correspondent exhuming ghosts runnels rapt into ice terrified of myself
Siyah of a New Moon
The day I leave the boarding school, a nilgiri tree faints & in farsi,
N sings hamsar-am—this too is a way to monument what eludes
us in the temperament of hereafters. Any scalp’s window splitting
its own veins to coddle light, fulgor-boned ghosts, a new voice &
its brittle, copal-splendored bulb. Wrecked crate, the trave parted
from its horse. What is emptiness worth if not surrounded by some
-thing always threatening to cut open its eclipse? Return, minatory.
Take everything as is the habit of your name. As is this sugared lump
of a moon burning in the spiritblack of ivy ponds. A nose hunting grass
for a graze of pelt, a lick of claw. In the body’s hot dirt, heart’s doubled
Catatonic—a dumped piñata, its dumbfounded splattering, attar of blood,
a true roja. A scarlet ibis in its black-beaked prayers to slippery fish. What is
upheld in the absence of body is space where it could have slept without
interruptions of ordered meanings. What kind of longing isn’t incantation,
martyred? Jezebel & the curs. All of us consenting to a quiet ceraunomacy. A fire-bellied fist. A baccara rose. Our darkest ash. Our most amavasya.
Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo-Rroma psychologist, writer, & mental health focused artivist. She is the author of Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2016), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2017) & The Blues Kali (Lithic Press, Forthcoming) & can be found squeeing about militant bunnies @zahararaesque on twitter/FB/IG or www.zaharaesque.com.