You’re the god of small slaughters

excerpts from Fatimah Asghar’s “If They Come for Us”

photograph by A.B. Godfreed

I live
in a country whose sun is war
we keep rotating around its warmth
Here we all become towelheads, amorphous
fears praying to a brown god

1947: the cannons sound during
Ramzan & everyone holds their breath
We aren’t at war.
Just neighbors who like to kill each other

They asked for a map
& so I drew a line
no one knows the boundaries
bodies spoon like commas,
waiting
……………..cast lines
across a liquid border & become
spies

Everyone wants Kashmir but no one wants Kashmiris
how easy to make a word just a word

All the people I would be are dangerous
manifest destinied our way through the mac & cheese
massacring the scripture in our American mouths
this is the cost of looking the other way
when they come for us