Rough Drafts for the Future
Sahar Romani · Prairie schooner · 2023
Rough Drafts for the Future Sahar Romani (bio) In the first draft of your future, days promenadecarefree with high-tops, desi hip hop, ora Nusrat qawwali on repeat. Almost always,you run into a friend on the corner street,small geographies of the big city. Somewherea cappuccino foams with your name. Tuesday nightsshow up sexy and analytical—perhaps a performanceof flamenco (a troupe from Madrid!) or a poetat the café bar recites a sonnet you'll never forget.In this version of life, pleasure is the other wordfor present tense. Daylight savings arrives with hotnessof turtlenecks and potlucks and you fall in lovewith your own silvering and the novel at the bedside—the one with no arc but an interior, quiet and delicious.*In the second draft of your future, four tuxedo catsgraze your ankles—Shabnam, Sikander, Lal Bahadur,and Romeo. You are where you always are—cross-legged at a wooden desk with a viewof a sparrow's nest and mountains mistyas oracles. Tired of your own mindyou devote afternoons in pursuit of translating Urdu—a poem, a pamphlet, a recipe. An excuseto inhabit the sensibility of stranger and kinfrom another century, another patch of dirt.How do you render the word "hasrat" in English? [End Page 93] A wish unfulfilled? Or is it desire spokenin the same breath as regret? The image of a womanturning to look back as she walks ahead.*In the third draft of your future, you livein an economy of breast milk and dirty diapers.You deal in the currency of board books andhand-me-downs. Deep in middle age, why not discovermotherhood? Sleep for an era of quarter-nights,medium-low. Then wake with astonishmentat eyelashes, toenails, and the miracle of a burp.With a little human's future, will your future growtwo-fold? Or will it thwart? This life was never singularbut relational. The self big enough now to bow outof the protagonist's role. A plot twist, a swervein this aging body of yours, will you sprout a new heart.And will it be ready. For the break. The burst.*You have no stomach for guiltin the fourth draft of your future.Its solid weight. Metallic taste.Deep purple tones. The bruiseit leaves below your spleenlike the time you said No to the family weddinginvitation in Orange County and insteadread a novel in your apartment alone,got tacos after midnight with a friend.Guilt lurked, uninterested in ethics.Just shame. How many rehearsals did it take to let go?To say yes to yourself and never flinch.Face clear in the mirror. Eyes steadyon a reflection that is only yours to carry. [End Page 94] Sahar Romani Sahar Romani is author of the chapbook The Opening, selected by Kazim Ali as a winner of the 2022 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems appear in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, the Brooklyn Rail, Slow Down, Yale Review, and elsewhere. She teaches first-year writing at New York University. Romani grew up in Seattle and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens. Copyright © 2023 University of Nebraska Press