Breadcrumb #642

ASHNA ALI

“It’s not about shame or guilt,” she tells me, 
lip-hanging a cigarette like an old movie man,

white gust engulfing my face. “It’s that I lovingly love to sin.” 
We are grown, but love to imagine the mother-horror still. 

I think: oh, if they could see us. Noses buried in smoke hair, 
wine-sour in a lavender bath, panting. The pink of her skin. 

My hot copper. She anoints me in the blood of her lord, 
pouring mouth-first. Red running from collarbone to breast 

to water, that I might be savored. We exchange conversions. 
My head in the plunge of a gourmand. She, mouthing any declaration 

to speak us into sin. How many Hail Mary’s her mother would prescribe.
The dinner plate shatter of my mother’s Astaghfirullah!

Oh, if they could see us. Sopping hungers, sisterly cornucopia, 
nightly saturnalia, this tittering, this moon growl, 

this open-hearted haram in a bedroom painted with gold crosses, 
heads turned down. The kind of worship I like best, 

eating and eating to be free.

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