Pluviophile
Pluviophile
Yusuf Saadi
Copyright © Yusuf Saadi, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].
Nightwood Editions
P.O. Box 1779
Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0
Canada
Cover Design: Charlotte Gray
Typography: Carleton Wilson
Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.
Printed and bound in Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Pluviophile / Yusuf Saadi.
Names: Saadi, Yusuf, 1990- author.
Description: Poems.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190201312 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190201320 | ISBN 9780889713741 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713758 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS8637.A225 P58 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23
For mom ’n abu, suto api, apa moni, biya (and ibi)
Love Sonnet for Light
I know a star in Andromeda broke every colour in your heart. That you shivered yourself to sleep in a meteor’s crevice or moon’s crater whose dust is now my skin. Beyond my finitude you dream a wave and particle at once. Know I love the way you warm my fingers, pour gilt on my hardwood floors, bear the universe’s stories through bedroom windows. I wish I could touch you— not like two electrons repulsing, nor within the semiotics of language, but hold you how I hold a hand when I’m afraid— and close my eyes when you’re naked.
Breaking Fast
The gestalt of my kitchen includes madness: oval wooden cutting boards tinged with blood and an electric juicer extracting the guts from an orange. Terracotta flowerpots on windowsills shelter exhausted purple hearts that slump against the pane. The oven throbs. On the tiled floor a fridge and pantry pose as rook and bishop. Our ticking toaster counts down the end of time.
My mom walks in and turns the radio on: the adhan being recited to break fast. A man screams or sings in cryptic Arabic muffled by radio static. Steam rises from haleem my mom stirs on the stove; the frying pan’s oil sizzles aloo pakoras. Seedless dates on white china plates and glasses of water on the kitchen table.
The smoke alarm shrieks its sharp laments. My mom stands on a chair and fans the alarm with a J-cloth— as if waving a flag in surrender.
Amperage
Why can’t we harness sound for energy? Skyline powered by Chopin, soliloquies brew our morning coffee? I understand the science, vibration/wattage, yet my hands tremble to Shelley’s chorus while I shiver Arctic sounds. Diminuendo gathers us to places without railings, of nearly trans- cendental feelings, so how can children’s screams not turn an oven off? And we could animate our cars with lovers’ arguments, a mother’s non-stop babble jolt a Macintosh, a faucet’s dribble fly a warplane. I would whisper lay your sleeping head my love to flush the toilet.
Unpaid Editorial Internship
We stapled your promise inside our eyelids; now we sleep to your image in tapered blazer and leather suitcase whispering, If you work hard you can have this. So we wake at seven. Cook lunch. Daub makeup on irises, stuff biceps with protein powder. When the Visa bill arrives, lock it in the mailbox until it growls so loud we can’t sleep. If there were a pill for hope each pharmacy would be sold out.
We patiently await our future. In the meantime, skimp on TTC fare when attendants aren’t looking, barely strong enough to push through turnstiles. Add another lie to resumes under receipts for arts degrees. Hungry until we’re nearly transparent. Bearing sisters’ hand-me-down dreams and inheriting gas at a $1.30 per litre.
Sometimes we wish we could curl (becoming as small as an Oxford comma) into a warm pothole on a busy street, live there as part of the city, regard the world between total eclipses cars cause as they drive by.
We’ve scoured wardrobes for soft cotton fabrics to touch against faces like surrogate mothers. Rubbed words together like flint for a day’s motivation. Alarm clocks have towered above watered-down sleeps. On rare occasions, we treat ourselves to fancy cups of coffee, dark chocolate, reveries. Writing poetry at night with the rust from our lives.
Rough Draft
I set up my apparatus on the wooden table: voice recorder, open notebook, Sharpie pen and sharpened pencil. Across from me the woman and her son sat on rickety chairs. I clicked the recorder on; its light blinked beside the teacup that steamed between us. The house’s front door was half-open, sunlight wandering in shyly across the floor over the mountain chert I had dragged in. From outside, female Pashto voices I did not understand and children playing skiffle songs with metal debris and whistling folk tunes. I asked the son if he attended school. He looked at the voice recorder’s red light, its cyclops eye, and inquired whether this was part of the interview. He sat straight as if at a business meeting, his face clean-shaven except two hairs above his lip that he must have missed with his razor. His tensed forearms on the table were pale as mine. I told him to relax. The aroma of basmati rice from the stove warmed the air and a fly buzzed around our ears. I have to make sure I say the right thing, he said. His English was immaculate. His mother pushed the teacup toward me with thin, lightly wrinkled
