Bargaining

Forgive this island. Its spoiled midnight.
Its damp moon. Its black surf, an altar

seducing you. This is your life.
Your youth, a goldfish in a glass bowl.

Record the ocean’s rhythmic pulse for your grandmother.
Go. Gather the stillness in your fists.

Your hungry limbs. Cage your pulse. Slip into the Pacific.
Allow the sharp tooth of the sea

to graze your bare legs. Let Fatima’s gold hand gasp
against your neck. Ignore her.

These days, she barely listens to you.
These days, she’s less pendant,

more noose. Still, the surf wrinkles
under that tart, black sky.

Fashion yourself into a sponge
and float like a plank.

There is honor in granting a crisis permission
to swallow you whole.

To spit you back out into that chocolate-dipped surf.
Kerosene-drum heart.

Curdling in a wet purgatory thousands of miles
from home. Imagine your grief inverted.

Your grandmother’s porcelain legs
with no sign of shatter.

Stitch them back together
with the black thread of your hair.

You’ll try, won’t you?

To recreate that teacup elegance.
What’s a holiday you can’t savor?

You, sourpuss.
You, spooky and spooked.

Pretend to be weightless.
No gravity.

No legs.
Just the velvety surf.

inviting you to forget.

Autumn Requiem 

Our final October is the alarm clock’s keen.
You, with your proud surgeon’s hands, spin a trip as solution.
You contort the spine of our Metro-North tickets,

disguise errant jewels of conversation
as balm: mulled cider, an unimportant NPR podcast, my father’s birthday.
Those hard-earned pebbles of connectivity.

See, we still belong to one another.
The stiff wind at Storm King bites our cheeks red.
I love you like an earthquake loves its faults.

We trudge to Louise Bourgeois’ Eyes and pose for pictures.
We’re from the city, I say, by way of apology.
Maple leaves litter the ground: scarlett, orange, yellow.

I envy nature its luscious unburdening:
an annual, expected implosion.
My pupils inhale the map of your form, counting the years

I have charted. We, overgrown. It’s inevitable:
a scalpel dividing the inventory of our lives.
The erasure of shared language; the blurry concert tickets,

the bone-white tube of Crest no longer serving two.
You still have my copy of Kitchen Confidential,
nestled in the wooden crib of your bedside table.

I’ll buy you a Santoku knife in Tokyo, you’d promise.
You meant it then. In a past life, who were we to one another?
You, a mushroom of salt, dreaming in the Dead Sea.

I, the water, painting your crystals with my tongue:
erosion veiled as affection. Nothing survives here,
but oh, it was beautiful. How we’ve morphed now:

just two boxers, sheathed in metal,
circling the ring: each beginning to mourn
the other’s shadow.

Bio: Hailing from Virginia, Insiya Taj is a South-Asian American poet and healthtech professional. For the last decade, New York City has been her home. In August 2024, she was a featured poet for the “Embracing Every Hue” reading series curated by Darius Phelps. She is the winner of Brooklyn Poets’ 2024 Yawp Poem of the Year Contest.