By Tarfia Faizullah
I worry that my friends
will misunderstand my silence
as a lack of love, or interest, instead
of a tent city built for my own mind,
I worry I can no longer pretend
enough to get through another
year of pretending I know
that I understand time, though
I can see my own hands; sometimes,
I worry over how to dress in a world
where a white woman wearing
a scarf over her head is assumed
to be cold, whereas with my head
cloaked, I am an immediate symbol
of a war folks have been fighting
eons-deep before I was born, a meteor.
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"It turns out that what I worry over the most is being misunderstood," Falzullah tells Poets.org. "I'm trying to complicate and expand how we are seen versus how we see ourselves. I like the idea of a speaker who picks her own symbols, in this case, a meteor: a body from outer space that becomes more and more incandescent, until her arrival into the earth's atmosphere is announced by a streak of light."
Although it isn't really warm enough to feel like April, it was sunny on Tuesday, which made the breeze feel a lot nicer. I did the stuff I had to do in the morning so that after stopping at the mall for some unsuccessful shopping, I could take a nice long walk along the creek and see the violets and buttercups growing across from the park train station. Near the tennis center there were Virginia bluebells blooming!
Paul, Cheryl, and I took a night off from Marvel movies to watch The Flash (where now they've ruined by memory manipulation the female villain who was the only thing making this season's endless boring arc worthwhile) and Black Lightning (not as good as last week's police brutality episode but still excellent). I can no longer deal even with late night comics reporting the news, urgh!
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