Summer Qabazard is a poet who grew up in Kuwait and now lives in Normal, Illinois where she is a PhD student at Illinois State University.
Her poem "All Hands Bury the Dead" appears in The University of Missouri – St. Louis's literary magazine, LitMag.
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Rain Song
Rain settles on my skin in waves of white
finding me through green canopies
I cover my head in the growing dark that cannot hold together.
Watching a woman face the universe with her mouth open
to remember the taste of rain,
when I look around, the whole country is drinking.
Her white blouse becomes slick against her skin
she tells me who she is, but I ignore it
wanting her to be who I want her to be.
She is becoming poetry
she is drowning in her own fluids
and I am floating in the cosmos.
A representative from the spirit world
follows us, taking notes
wondering where I am in relation to her.
I say she is a pack of cosmic light
and I am an unknown arrangement of particles
we are the same world, the two of us dying away.
When I open my eyes, I don’t see god
sometimes I’d like you to convince me
to believe in heaven.
It is velvet here in the sky
I let it slide down my body
washing off the fingerprints and cobwebs.
With each snap of rain
I ask constellations to convince me
that I am not a fragment of a broken philosophy.