Encounters by Alycia Pirmohamed

after Sara Ahmed

I pour water from a vase onto my avenues of amaryllis.

My skin speaks to me about her own shadow.

This month alone, I have had twenty dreams

that feature the erosion of my body.

—I am so obsessed with making meaning.

I fall through the word ancestor.

Imagine a life that duplicates within a paragraph.

They arrive one after another, all my repetitions.

I exist in elsewheres. I move from room to room

until I see my reflection in a tall glass.

She is a translation from five years ago with ash on her lip.

Rainwater touches my cheek. This is a new skin memory.

If I could walk through time I would visit the other rains

that touched my other bodies.

I would treat my other bodies with more kindness.

Twenty dreams later and a birthmark still surprises me

in this light. Two birds look like the same dark blot

when swathed in morning fog.

In some photographs I am a silhouette

and only make out the vague curvature of my questions.

In some dreams I lay my subject across the garden.

We face one another. I hand her my rivers.

New women sprout with wet hair.

__________________

Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water (Polygon Books and YesYes Books) and a part of the nature writing project, Field Notes Collective. Her nonfiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize and is forthcoming with Canongate. Alycia currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s at the University of Cambridge.