POEM AS VIDEOTAPE

In the shower in July sun. In that hot, short history

of every atom that composed us—we were embracing

stranger versions ourselves. Your blue eyes made more wet

in my hands blessed with you in them. We held an afternoon

of radiance; a fresh fever—of the apparitions

in fogged mirror. Reflecting

questions of an eternal now made clean.

And how that afternoon now is just a memory to reel—

winnowing on from a flat, mind-fire—from intangible black

road of forgetting. To swim with all other streamlines of love

before and twice missed. I have it all here on videotape.

Jai Hamid Bashir is a Pakistani-American  and second-generation artist. She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University, where she was awarded the Linda Corrente Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in and is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Palette Poetry, Asian American Writer's Workshop, Sierra Magazine, Poets.org, and others.