Sestina In Which I Try to Escape My Inheritance

In a dream, grandmother commands me bol!
and I speak to the ancestor in my bone.
Stuttering words cross borders,
unstitching themselves from the bond
of mother’s tongue and its boiling
fever and I awake a newborn.

Mother had a still-born.
He refused to speak when she said bol!
Early May sun boiling,
they buried his chicken-like bones,
severing all earthly bonds,
confining grief in the tiny coffin’s borders.

In a different May, I cross borders
wanting to be a newborn.
Disregarding my slow detachment from old bonds,
the immigration officer barks for my heritage but I hear bol!
like a sudden clanking in my bones
and I hand my papers, boiling.

In my stomach, anxiety boils
the native fish father fed me before the borders,
before the crossing, before the possibility of living with a fishbone
stuck in my throat no matter where I try to be reborn.
I remind myself: BOL!
and look up how to refuse an inherited bond.

Women in my family share an evergreen bond,
all part of a chain of voiceless crows. Recipe includes boiling
a cup of grief on their tongues, stuttering to say bol!
giving many languages citizenship on their mouth’s borders,
until they slowly start to lose all their tongues, reborn
as a child they raised, slurring their r’s and s’s to the bone.

I refuse to eat anything with a bone.
Every hospital visit, I ask the doctors how to break a familial bond
and beg God to let me walk out of there a newly born.
On my tongue, a slow boiling
has started to break the borders
of familiar sounds and I keep chanting bol!

like a prayer, a plea, a melody, a ticket to be reborn, a breaker of bonds, bol! bol! bol!
The ancestor in my bones visits again in a dream that spills out of its borders
and gives me a cold cup of tea but on my tongue, it’s boiling.

Hafsa Zulfiqar is a poet from Pakistan and an incoming MFA candidate at Cornell University. Her work which has received the WNDB Walter Grant, three Best of the Net and a Pushcart nomination explores brown identity, dreams, language, liminality, and above all the notion of inheritance; it can be found or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, swamp pink, Tupelo Quarterly, The Offing, Lunch Ticket, Up the Staircase Quarterly, AAWW: The Margins, & elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @HafsaZUnar and Instagram @vibingwithabook