Prime Time News, and: What Use is Clairvoyance When the World Wants to Splay on My Palms?
Dure Ahmed · Pleiades · 2023
Prime Time News, and: What Use is Clairvoyance When the World Wants to Splay on My Palms? Dure Ahmed (bio) Prime Time News The women who buy paper towels from a billionaire are sweating in the kitchen, washing dishes, making post-dinner chai while the men and I gawp at the TV. I'm not a woman, I want to announce but I don't want to sound self-absorbed and complicit. What I really want to do is go into the kitchen and radicalize everyone. The ocean is on fire, our homelands are drowning, two-day shipping is not a blessing my loves, people and backs and bladders and the Earth are breaking. Listen, if we roll out an ancient device to usher in a revolution no one will ever ask you to make chai, and serve it in small cups to each ungrateful, distracted hand. If we storm the castles of the oppressors, this time for the sick and dying, the ones shot by drones, your children's unfunded schools, your right to the doctor's visits you've hidden from your husbands, you'll also never again need to get your mons and labia waxed. There are so many of you, as you rally to see if you need your tubes tied and where to get the cheapest halal lamb. There are so many of you, drooling at the new Costco, the ailing aunt who has a kilo of gold. There are so many of you please wake up. There are so many of you, I need you to help me. [End Page 101] What Use is Clairvoyance When the World Wants to Splay on My Palms? After Kaveh Akbar ("Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveler") Nail salons and indoor dining re-open the technician yawns above my toes European Wax Center leaves a message on my phone We can do the bikini but sorry not your eyebrows, they are on your face I roar with laughter like I'll never die The prophet Joseph interpreted dreams for a cruel king which means that visions like poems are not very discerning about who they pursue so why did I live in fear? For years I wrapped my hair in opaque fabric and feared charcuterie boards ("sorry, it's the prosciutto") and bars even women but I still dreamt of flocks of crows like I were Cain and thought Will only crows be tender to me? Do signs in dreams leave you when you find other things? I drop my bag and frozen in the bounce of purple lights I watch it spill coins a birth-control bubble pack Polaroids eleven liquid lipstick bottles among a hundred dancing feet No one look at me except the beauty I'll drag home you, who will hair-chested, slightly boobed, nibble up my legs this chain around your neck with God's name will glint wet when your face emerges from between my thighs [End Page 102] Dure Ahmed Dure Ahmed is an immigrant, Muslim writer who lives in New Jersey. Their poems have appeared in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, and ANMLY among others. Dure is a 2023 Bread Loaf Contributor, and they have an MFA from the University of Arizona. Copyright © 2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press