Jai Hamid Bashir

The Neighbors

Narcoleptic porch light swings envious,
an electric siren for fireflies marking the bluedark. Standing underneath

yellowed nimbus, watching the collie sleepwhimper
at my feet showing gleams of her teeth. Tremor of stars

and waving grass perform a semaphore
signaling to sleep what cannot sleep. Looking for silence

in the dead apiary, buzzed in syntax
from heat without end. A bright and common moon
emerges

baying for canines—desperate for
devotion. Moths—worldmakers for
night in their desire,

and their eternal worship—light, something had to shape
those bedfellows in rhyme. Closing each window, a sign

in pursuit of safeguarding our unlovely hearts from fates
of fatal surrender. Glows ripening. Fattening like peaches—

all the lightbulbs growing. In hums of cities
below, arriving like a dead star’s flash, I
notice

a set of soft eyes in someone’s driveway. There she is,
exhaling profanities for a lover who has left for the last time;
she leaves

all her lights on, ashes her cigarette, and
waves — as if I am an old friend. It doesn’t
matter

if I make myself dinner or keep on
waving— I’ll still wake up bloomed
with this hunger

Jai Hamid Bashir is a Pakistani American and second-generation artist. An MFA student at Columbia University in the city of New York, she recently received the Linda Corrente Memorial Prize. The winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, she also been featured in publications such as Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Palette Poetry, and has work forthcoming from the American Poetry Review.