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ramna

@inkywings / inkywings.tumblr.com

My name is Ramna. There is something in my throat, like diamonds, like ink.
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June after June, our mamas wave their yellow shawls from the balcony and ask us not to play too long in the sun. Our people do not tan, they'd say, we only grow too brown. I think about our girls relegated to the shade. I think about summer as a softening peach and a thick, molasses kind of love in its pit and brown girls being denied a bite. I think about sugar in the frying pan — about sizzle, about white becoming caramel, about all the sweetest things only growing sweeter in the heat.  I think about the sun  and the way it ripens and also forgives. About its fire growing arms and holding our girls by their cheeks and whispering into their mouths: I do not bite. I do not bite. I think about letting this benevolent sun swallow my skin and about this being the perfect way to rest, my brown and the soil as one. I think about epitaph — here lies Ramna,  she played too long in the sun.

Growing Dark | Ramna Safeer

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exciting

Alyssa Monks is SUCH a talented artist! These are oil paintings!

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inkywings
Dear God, sometimes I imagine your laughter and it is clean and thin, like green thread of summer evening. When it is all faded and gone, the sound of my mother  chewing spoonfuls of brown sugar in the dark, the sound of sweet earthquakes splitting between her teeth, is the next best thing.  Dear God,  in another version of this,  home is nothing more than sunken walls and  tired foreheads touching ground in tired prayer. In another version of this,  the way our shoulders touched and it sent gravity swelling in our palms, is the only thing we will never have to translate, the only thing we will never have to fold small enough to fit into the mouths of others in order for it to be real. Dear God,  can you tell me when we began to house a stranger? Or if not that, how the stranger is the one who built the house?  Can you tell me why it is lonely to begin a poem about a big-boned, benevolent love and to have it open its sad eyes halfway  and to have it change its name to something terrible? Dear God, in another version of this,  I hear your laughter and it is not unfamiliar.  It tastes like speaking forever about nothing. It tastes like friends who scratch your scalp with their nailbitten fingers and tell you there is nothing better than your flavour of lost. Dear God, the dinner is cold and I am trying my hardest.  In another version of this,  I am trying and  the whole world nods and  everyone breathes a sigh so full, so tornado that the whole evening kneels to pray and everyone believes me.

This is Not a Prayer | Ramna Safeer (via inkywings)

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This year, I am relearning to be chosen. Which is to say, I am relearning the way a kiss swings its golden legs off the edge of your lips before falling into a red and laughing mouth, like a heavy, heavy poem. Which is to say, I am returning to myself, to water the houseplants hung in my corners and shake the dust from the shelves and reread the pages bent backwards. This year, I am relearning religion. Which is to say, God is a microwave meal and the sermon sits, swelling, on the brow-bones of the women who love me. Which is to say, this is a prayer and in my own way, I say it loud. Which is to say, I whisper it into the morning, when my voice is still remembering itself. This year, I am relearning to be touched. Which is to say, I am remembering the way to empty someone into yourself and walk into the night and become lighter, become light.

Resolution for the Brave | Ramna Safeer

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She was the start of a beautiful hurt. In the right kind of wind, her evenings sung  a lot like losing. When the air grew sharp, she told me I was easy to forget.  When the air grew biting, I believed her. He is not a God, she whispered. But you will bend your knees to his absence anyway. You will ask so often for an impossible thing  that it, too, will become prayer. Her stomach was a hollow promise  and I was dancing in it.  She kissed me cold. Taught me the names of lakes so deep that bodies can go lost into a wet nothing. Taught me that this hurt is a body in its own way, with its own kind of drowning, with its own kind of failing limbs.

She, September

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In these dreams it’s always you: the boy in the sweatshirt, the boy on the bridge, the boy who always keeps me from jumping off the bridge. Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.

Richard Siken, “I Had a Dream About You” (via fauxpas)

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Silly girl. His throat is a hornet's nest hanging in the forest. Most days, you could not tell the kiss from the sting — this is the anatomy of a love worth forgetting.  Silly girl. To have something  and not have the room to keep it.  To swallow the fog.  To chew the smoke. Silly girl. Soon, there will be no more  metaphors and the language we speak will stop sounding real. It is just the way the crooked crumbles. Silly girl. Take a nap in the back seat. Drink up the orange glow of 8am.  Wallow in the lonely of healing. Silly girl. When you are smiling for the camera  and you forget where to put your hands, bring them up to your sides.  When your arms begin to burn,  pockets of fire in your elbows,  memorize the sound of occupying space.

unlearning (a note to self) | Ramna Safeer

#writings#poetry#im trying#im trying im trying im trying
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My hair in your mouth. A noise in your heart like my face is your mosque and you are dancing in it. This is the thing I cling to.  An open-mouthed smile unraveling during a kiss, your lips hitting my teeth, a confession falling to the floor. Blossoming. Becoming real. We are not a love of togetherness. We are a love apart.  There is an uncountable distance  and so many moons  and each month leading up to your mouth is a month that did not lose us inside it.  There will be a scratch in my side or  a strawberry on my tongue or a thick,  dizzying fog in the street and I will remember  the way you ask me if I am okay, the way it makes me wonder if I am. There is nothing linear about this remembering. It just is. We just are.

Anatomy of a Love Apart | Ramna Safeer (via inkywings)

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and I can't imagine a time when I don't pass through and your sound is unfamiliar was what you said before  we both imagined  so hard it became true

Last One About You | Ramna Safeer

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I’m ok. I’m gonna be ok. I’m gonna live a beautiful life and I’ll get to know beautiful people. I will create things of beauty and be surrounded by flowers. And I’ll love myself, and I’ll be soft, I’ll be kind. And I’ll be ok.

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