Home '14

My mother folding the dresses
that no longer hold my ribs,
crouched on the dark brown couch
with cigarette burns in the armrest.
The polka dot dress from my eighth birthday,
the one with blueberry cheesecake stains near the hem,
that my mother washed five times.
She straightens its sleeves
as if she is not packing years of my skin
into a cardboard box.
My father with the television remote,
its bottom burned from my brother’s experiments,
clutched in one hand,
and a cigarette trembling in the other.
I can still hear the swarm of crickets
humming their elegies into the yellowed grass.
The click of my father's blue Zippo lighter
in the driveway.
My mother chopping carrots over the counter,
carrying the evening in the thick pink lines of her palms,
beads of sweat slicking her forehead,
while basil leaves writhed in the pan.
The dining table's now bent with craters
from dropped spoons, tea cups, screw drivers and fists.
It still keeps the prints of hands
that have not touched it in years.
I mistook the boxes for something that knew
how to protect the body,
instead they were an urn.

Zoha Kashif is a Pakistani-Canadian poet from Toronto. When she’s not writing, she’s usually gardening or playing fetch with her dog at the park. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Silver Canyon Review, The Michigan City Review of Books, Housebound Magazine, Andorinha Press, The Attic Review, A Few Words Magazine, ARTYK Magazine, and elsewhere.