Poetry: Paraphrasing an Ally’s Status by Abdulkareem Abdulkareem

for B

Our friendship is like a luminous energy from a spectrum

            of light. I paint you with crayon wax on the sky of my canvas.

On some days, we trade a catalog of discussions pulling 

          each other’s teeth with laughter. Your words—soothing as the rain, 

your beauty, jaw breaking. You tender a zephyr approach 

         to everything hard as a knuckle & untether gloom from my face 

with your  block of words—paraphrasing an ally’s status. 

        Perhaps, what we need sometimes is someone unafraid to pull

the strings of the weight of our worth. Perhaps

        we exist as a diphthong in every environment that names us. 

Our paths threaded into each other at the feet 

          of a threshold that held my stain. The worth breaking one. 

and we’ve built a pole of two sycamores beholding

      weight of a friendship. I’m still that boy who refracts from pulling

his arms into a woman & vice versa— for appreciation. 

        Perhaps not for the sake of a religion. Perhaps I’m too fragile 

at the edge of things like this. Perhaps we are both

              like air billowing into the right spaces that needs us like a zephyr.

Perhaps the wind is still a distant thing in the umbworld 

            that grasps us—o ally, the mouth that names us is still slobbering sugar

and the miracle that made us is like a whiff on a gentle night. 

Click the button below to subscribe to our Newsletter