Qamar Firdaus Saini
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
i think about cows and how you don’t eat beef for non-religious reasons. there is an after- taste i can’t describe – when our tongues meet i remember the twang of guitar strings, my shoulder dislocating from the weight of your head, my anchor, or our combined importance. everything was of utmost gravity, i was falling into orbit, your satellite, or maybe a meteor streaking away from its constellation. at the end you were ephemeral, like the wetness of the ground after a summer’s rain. there is something to be said about how you went or how, when it rains i still feel your chin digging into my shoulder. my arms are a flower un-blooming into your back. we are a bud; i am tilling your skin. we return to the field we spent our university nights – the glint of fireflies, the wetness of your lipstick glistening. some nights the stars watch me unhook every lock in your body, unpick these wounds. i bend your chest open to locate every vault. i am mining for the nights we laid at the bridge, watching other satellites or maybe airplanes journey across the sky. except this time, there is an ocean underneath us. this is not a metaphor, but a real sea brimming with fishes you can eat. except this: gravity doesn’t anchor the way we are. this time, the rain. we fall upwards instead.
Qamar Firdaus Saini is in the public service and is especially fond of Explosions in the Sky. He writes to remember. His recent poems are in Cordite Poetry Review, QLRS, and other anthologies by Singapore-based presses, and in works commissioned by National Gallery Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum, among others. He was a volunteer organiser for Sing Lit Station’s Manuscript Bootcamp, and is currently a member of ATOM, a writing collective.