Category: Sana Tamreen Mohammed

photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash.com

Out of order

I ask my body, ‘How heavy does it feel
to sit in a chair across the dead body?’
But we cannot call the body a ‘body’,
so ‘mother’ forgets to wake up this morning.

Someone curtains her with a sheet 
and all in the chairs breathe out at once.
From the other side of the division
where she uncurls her memory still
the sound of dripping water ruins my mind.

Someone shouts, ‘Everything here needs to be fixed.’
Walls swell with all the noise it carries within.
An old tank weeps through its cracks,
and water runs down the broken terrace,
my mind as the last funeral rite.

A voice from behind demands,
‘When this is over, call somebody to
mend our deceased water tank.’



Bio: Sana Tamreen Mohammed has co-authored Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems (BRP, Australia). A poet, an imagist and now a mother, her works have found homes in various journals, magazines and anthologies including Tupelo Press, The Peeking Cat Poetry and Dreich Magazine. She has edited The Prose and Poetry Anthology. She was a featured poet on a radio show in India. Her poems were displayed twice in Illinois. As a driftwood, she reads and selects submissions for EKL Review.

from pixabay

A stale banana and cold

Winter slips off a patio one sunny morning.
It turns white on the ground.
Everything else hits differently.
No blood oozes out of its skin.
The fractures of sun make it weep
till it drowns in its tears.

A banana stalls in a fruit bowl.
Dark spots tear some parts
exposing what’s left of the flesh.
On the inside too it rots and bleeds.
First, cold enters the skin then aims
at the heart and before you know
grief is all over you.
Cold in a plastic container,
cold on a wood plank patio,
open, open before the sunny winter morning.


Kitchen Spices

What more can I add to this soup?
Mother teaches to hold the ladle at an angle.
My arm sweats from turning over and over.
I forget about the salt again, anyway.
How much salt in the cellar holds up a kitchen?

The leaves turn raw turmeric in October,
burning paprika on the dying trees.
I notice the air fills with crunchiness 
and we empty our bowls without a word,
not saying how soups fill us only so far.

My stomach churns as I toss in the bed
keeping whatever remains in my body.
Morning finds the numbness in the arms,
sometimes tingling down the fingertips.


Bio: Sana Tamreen Mohammed has co-authored Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems (BRP, Australia). A poet, an imagist and now a mother, her works have found homes in various journals, magazines and anthologies including Tupelo Press, The Peeking Cat Poetry and Dreich Magazine. She has edited The Prose and Poetry Anthology. She was a featured poet on a radio show in India. Her poems were displayed twice in Illinois. As a driftwood, she reads and selects submissions for EKL Review.

at 4 a.m.

I woke up at 4 a.m.

Beside a couch, the body of a man
strikes a conversation with the body
of a rocket stuck in his room.

A piece of furniture moves inches away
making space for him to stretch his legs.
A lone bulb flickers to set the mood.
But we do not need it now.

Outside the window, neighbor’s
building inclines to eavesdrop,
collapsing on the sunlit street below.
Bellows order the day to seize,
ceasing their conversation like
a firecracker burning out.

He steals a cigarette from his rubbles,
rubs it against their dead talks
but we do not need any of this ever.


Bio: Sana Tamreen Mohammed has co-authored Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems (BRP, Australia). A poet, an imagist and now a mother, her works have found homes in various journals, magazines and anthologies including Tupelo Press, The Peeking Cat Poetry and Dreich Magazine. She has edited The Prose and Poetry Anthology. She was a featured poet on a radio show in India. Her poems were displayed twice in Illinois. As a driftwood, she reads and selects submissions for EKL Review.

Collaborative work: Between Here and There by Sana Tamreen Mohammed and art from Carl Scharwath

3 poems from Sana Tamreen Mohammed

Waken

I saw my breaths leaving my body,
suspending in the air.
Your eyes, those eyes seem to
notice the unspoken fear of loss
swelling up inside me
and we break into a
hundred nights of moonless sky.

Yes, it’s time I wrote about you

as I now place my palms over you.
Half-meditating hand-
tracing the energy
that pulsates in me.
In this instance, in this moment of
complete awareness I know how much
you’ve moved closer to my touch.

It takes only a moment of
knowing to be content with the world.
You exist in warm quickening.
A voice that calms me to sleep.
An open sky before my fragile self.

To the beatings of a heart

Your ear roots to my chest,
counts the flapping of wings.
My hummingbird of a heart
flits over years full of bloom
as those wasps build
their combs many times.
Once against the wall cornice,
now on my mesh-fenced patio.


I tell you, no man have found 
the algorithm of drowning.
I tell you, when a notion dies
screams escape long after 
the lightning flare of the wound.
Today, again we jump from topics,
a lighthearted roar, an opening
to the sound of disappearance.


Birdsongs

An odd leaf yellowing more
each day from an otherwise
busy stem that prepares
to house the last bud.
On days of lost belief, you are
the only sign of autumn.
A moment of truth.
October brings you to me
in a new kind of way.
A numb sense of relief
blues my daily sky.
I laugh with the slightest movements
of your love that grows inside me.
On days like these

odd leaf,
I wish I could show you how cold
winter feels without your hush sighs.
Nothing seems right in the
afterglow of what remains.
A dead forest calling out to
all the birds to sing once again.


Bio: Sana Tamreen Mohammed has co-authored Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems (BRP, Australia). A poet, an imagist and now a mother, her works have found homes in various journals, magazines and anthologies including Tupelo Press, The Peeking Cat Poetry and Dreich Magazine. She has edited The Prose and Poetry Anthology. She was a featured poet on a radio show in India. Her poems were displayed twice in Illinois. As a driftwood, she reads and selects submissions for EKL Review.
Collaborative work: Between Here and There by Sana Tamreen Mohammed and art from Carl Scharwath