Replacements
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland. She received an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying poetry written by second-generation immigrant authors. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, The London Magazine, Room Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, PRISM International, and others. Alycia is the author of the chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind (forthcoming, BOAAT Press) and the winner of the 2018 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest in poetry.
Long ago I gave you my country its whole body borderless
a mouth open to your worlds I gifted you these eyes threw stones
into water skip skip language and language raisined together
for as long as this new century moored beneath our skins.
What do you know about a young girl who watches snakes
through gallery glass who does not know how to navigate a world
without a shield do you call her present tense or wildflower
do you call her here and now or stranger or both?
Has long ago become here and now this empire repeating its adjectives
weighing down my tongues? I gave everything in return for a home.
I did not get to choose what was replaced or heavy
enough to sink. There was silk once before the girl opened the cage.
Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland. She received an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying poetry written by second-generation immigrant authors. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, The London Magazine, Room Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, PRISM International, and others. Alycia is the author of the chapbook Faces that Fled the Wind (forthcoming, BOAAT Press) and the winner of the 2018 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest in poetry.