In Company Cannot Fathom Relation
the native’s adhesion to the place, its language & the worth of prefiguring escapes the second overwhelmed by elocution & colors of masks, but she walks with him & the world becomes manageable. she became the world’s molecule, a passing being, stumbling upon small stones, intrinsically recruited by pavements, yet affinity cannot generate equivalence. cultivation, which she supposed as the furthest attempt at symmetry, was imitation; her semi-precious was animated through burden. they are sequential now: he’s disillusioned like a private island, like the kite in the kite runner & she, too, because if a native didn’t read her packet, she’d never be understood—
Revenue
past the arbitrary clamor
of having been in the midst of a conflict
I place the stem of a leaf in a glass cup
& believe its charge to disseminate
in such a barren attitude
I wanted him
to show up
to hold me as I held myself
and not drop me like school subjects
meandered my eyes out the window
once its roots developed
poems left
like a parchment from which
the initial writing has been washed off
and on which
I’m writing again
Child Guest
unambiguous chill poked through the lace of borrowed mosquito nets and I felt not-knowing away and awakened I stayed still took the neutral blue the lenient rays the aura asked me to wait wait for the grownups to wake this undoing neither approaching nor being petulant despite hunger or thirst I later recognized was a sensation inside the waiting person’s stomach overhearing an aphorism about salt and water imagine a mineral pinch as it spins liquid only to land at its bottom the teaspoon can overthrow its integrity again even with a slight gesture of a stir waiting in this sense is as stretched as return to the origin a trope perverse from the outset but I wait I wait for things to calm down I comply with the transition I get used to democracy in increments wait I don’t need to make this about us that city or the grandiose return of refugees we’re only a portal to fathom the ubiquity of standing in the corner while someone else occupies the middle of a thing a blues singer sings geographical determinism some assume it’s our faith that we’re slacking off that we need to rise up that we need to ask for things but I know these are interpretations of my dreams in my dream I was faceless I grieved and there has never been a certified copy or so I told myself how this is not a reoccurrence now I see I see now now I see that everyone is at the threshold of waiting because no one could stop for death
Hajar Hussaini
Hajar Hussaini is a poet and translator. Her poetry collection is Disbound (University of Iowa Press, 2022), and she has received a 2024 Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature for her translation of the poetry collection Wounded Vita Nuda by Maral Taheri (Deep Vellum, 2026) and a 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Khosraw Mani’s novel, Death and His Brother (Syracuse University Press, 2026). Hussaini has won fellowships from the MacDowell and Baldwin for the Arts, as well as a 2023 Carol Anne Donahue Prize from Russell Sage College and a faculty development grant from Skidmore College, where she is an assistant teaching professor of English. Alongside Matthew Klane and Amie Zimmerman, she co-curates the Salon Salvage reading series in Troy, NY. Her writings and translations have appeared in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, Annulet, and Asymptote, anthologized in Rumi: Roaming and Daedalus, and translated into Slovak by Terézia Klasová for Revue Prostor.