"Ideology" by Aria Aber

three girls ago
bloodroot: it was Eid
Al-Adha: a man

I loved shoved
my face into
German reeds

I can still feel his sweat
when I unsleep: the cleave
of his breath-lice

warming chains
of my necklace
I was without people

oh so summerful
I invented my girlhood
I languaged myself

a knife-body
yet all uncles said
I’m badly woven: bad

muslin: say forgiveness
comes easy say freckledirt
buried the faces

of my sisters: lakewarm
& plentiful—
we kiss we touch

we Magdalene each
other it’s true
during the adhan I pulled

down my tights
nylon black like the chador
of my mother

I licked from my yesterlove
the salt licked
real good—to pluck it again

I must whorl ad nauseam
for the addendum
of flesh the soft

sumac, cottonwood hard
as the nipples
he circled

we are singing
it’s spring and God to my song
is unlistening, unlistening

o Maryam o Miriam
o Mary we are undying
we are not gone

are not slayed we are
unslaying—our hand
wields this life

and I ply myself
out come here
between my legs

come in all are welcome who believe

About This Poem

“Inspired by Lucie Brock-Broido, I wrote this for my own girl-self and yours. The Magdalenes of us, both the apostles and the whores, shunned from our communities. Loving is good, wanting to be loved is good—knowing this doesn’t make you any less Muslim than the hypocritical uncles who judged you and called you ‘bad,’ the cousins who called you ‘slut,’ the neighbors who watched you and ‘shamed’ your family, who called you ‘impure.’ Integrity to the self is as pure as integrity to your culture. I want to tell the daughters of the future: you can be anything you want. Your desire is not a sin.”
—Aria Aber

Aria Aber is the author of Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

Poetry by Aber

Hard Damage

(University of Nebraska Press, 2019)

"Dove, Interrupted" by Lucie Brock-Broido

"100 Bells" by Tarfia Faizullah

"Girl Country" by Ansley Moon

September Guest Editor: Eduardo C. Corral

Thanks to Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2020, who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a Q&A with Corral about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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September 9, 2019

Ideology