In this dream, I fly over
a canyon
filled with faces.
I am guided by a garland of
my mother’s voice, the slip
and echo
of contralto, a stammer
in the low
height of the troposphere.
It weaves water into silk
and silk into saree,
and in this dream, I become a wren
with pleated feathers, a songbird-
daughter eating sweets.
How many of those faces
are my own?
How many daughters eating jelabi,
how many
canyons filled with versions of selves
that I have shed
and shed and even killed?
I am shaped
like my country,
but only one of them.
I am shaped like loss.
I wake up
not as the bird,
but as the canyon.