Love Poem Resisting the Neon Larvae of Headlines

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The world, a baby tied to dynamite, 
a butterfly perforated with poison 
arrows, burdened with deception in bones.
We rise as emissaries to God, our
bodies blue with reason, three quarters 
of the time, the rest, inked with florets, tiny
tendrils of bread with miniscule kisses 
of Turkish honey. We start by wiping 
down the constellation, then our hungers–
we write ourselves anew in God’s bulletin.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the winner of the San Diego Book Award, Sable Books’ Hybrid Book Prize, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart multiple times. Her poetry collections include Kohl and Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, Bosnian, and Urdu, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in McSweeney’s In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth. 

Andreas/SurrealGradients is a 23 year old self-taught digital artist. His artworks are an escape into surreal worlds and by the use of photo manipulation, his artworks come to life.
Some of his collections are available on OpenSea.