Displacement Glitch & Other Poems
Alycia Pirmohamed
Inherited Knowledges of The Sea
On the shore there are traces of last
night’s darkness
intangible artefacts, narratives, overrun
with salt, water.
The ghosts prepare for an advancing tideline, gently
pleating my sleep
into dream fragments.
In the mornings, I clear the endless foam off
of another lesson.
What is a written map if not a scholarly
tool of omission?
I am raised on colonial iconographies,
an image of the earth
bisected by borders and variegated hues,
regions partitioned
despite the land memories across them.
In an attempt to attend to the contours
of a living landscape, I kneel
at the cusp of the past, splay my fingers
out across time and space
disassemble into visible and invisible
shapes of wet sand.
The written map is a political map
that erases the route
of transgenerational spirits or the ocean’s deep
indigo passage.
How much violence lives in the residue
between arrive and archive?
When the sea ascends my body,
it scales all the way into my ancestral memory
my overlapping layers of inheritance.
Nostalgia meets bodily tissue meets calabash curve.
My memory storing capabilities
are tied to the great sea.
On the shore I can’t help but narrate the past.
Her Body is Her Language, Her Language is Her Body
In the imaginary garden
I plant a smooth tongue.
Here, I’ll grow kindness
from the seedlings
of my small glossaries.
Index cards still wet with ink.
The names of things I’ve loved
catalogued in my old diary.
An inventory of the places
I wander to in the dark
in the middle of the night
as if to escape the sheen
of my repeated apologies.
In the imaginary garden
I disassemble all traces
of my lingering shame.
A fragment of new growth
reshapes into the woman
I want to become.
She glows with the residue
of something cherished.
A fuchsia petal sprouts
like a searching limb.
What does time afford my body?
My skin? A liquid language
seeps into the dream-soil.
An ancient burden falls
off my face into the water
I’ve cupped in my hands.
Its cerulean-tinged stream
slithers onto my green project.
In quiet, milky whispers
across the gardenscape
I gather these new words.
Displacement Glitch
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet based in Scotland. She is the author of Another Way to Split Water, as well as the pamphlets Hinge and Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative essay Second Memory. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network, a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics Program, and she currently teaches on the MSt. Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Alycia has held post-doctoral positions at University Edinburgh and at the University of Liverpool, and she received an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Find her online at alycia-pirmohamed.com on Twitter @a_pirmohamed, and on Instagram @alyciap_.