i’ve been eating poetry again.
you can tell from the ink
on the edges of the cutting board,
from the way the cumin spills beside commas.
i forget what i came here to cook.
the counter is stained with metaphors.
a bookmark sticks to the butter knife.
sometimes, i say grace
with bitten lips.
swallow verses i never meant
to survive.
they taste like salted wounds,
like the way grief folds itself into
cloth napkins
and vanishes before dessert.
some nights,
poems start in the part of my throat
that forgets how to ask for help.
i chop onions and my hands tremble—
not from the sting,
but from memory.
i count time in bleeding lines now—
stanzas stitched across pages like arteries,
trying not to burst.
silence has stopped coming.
even the refrigerator
hums in couplets.
someone once said
write about mangoes,
about june rains,
about the scent of roses
in glass bottles on balconies.
but i don’t know how
to write joy
without apologizing.
instead, i write the girl
who wakes up tasting rust.
who wears rage like perfume.
who brews chamomile
to silence the shaking.
who applies lipstick like ritual—
soft red armor
before stepping into rooms
that forget her name.
i imagine tenderness
as a guest
who doesn’t knock.
i invent her.
she has sandalwood breath,
lullabies for hands.
she doesn’t carry the scent of panic.
she laughs like rain.
i call her poem.
i call her prayer.
in my mirror,
she doesn’t flinch.
she wears sorrow like silk,
lets go of love
like a leaf in october.
she is the daughter my mother wanted:
gracious,
fragrant,
unbroken.
not like me—
not the girl who claws at yesterday’s throat
with chipped nails
and nostalgia under her skin.
sometimes,
i whisper her name
into the steam rising
from a pot i forgot to turn off.
the meat burns.
the stove clicks.
and i write her into being—
as if naming her
could resurrect
the version of myself
that didn’t have to earn
gentleness.
as if poems could parent the girl
who never got
to be a child.
even on the messiest nights—
when the sink swells with guilt,
grease-lined plates,
spoons stained with meals left half-finished—
someone listens to me
beside the stove.
i let myself dissolve,
soft,
like saffron
in warm milk.
we stir chai,
talk about books, heartbreak and hope.
the kitchen hums in couplets.
the silence does not come.
even in this ruined kitchen—
this mess of metaphors,
unfinished meals,
half-cut onions
drying like wounds
i never finished writing.
and still,
something holy simmers.
even this sorrow
smells
like a beginning.
—Noor-ul-Taba