i am trying to hold you and i delicately.
you — woven like a spider’s web in between
my ribs, crisscrossed and haunting.
you knit together the space of my
diaphragm, so my heart never outgrows
the thread-bare chapel it lives in.
i — i test the word “gentle” in my mouth,
gentle, gentle, gentle. how it feels, how it tastes.
i ponder it. my body, still cradling the glass drops
that fell when the sky shattered. i still remember
your hand brushing mine. when the mind was
suddenly no longer cruel to the body.
i hold us with care, a deliberateness i didn’t have before,
this time my gloves are laced with impartiality.
i still hold us with reverie, this time like an
archeologist. i hold us up to the light.
Aamina Mughal is a young writer from Seattle where she serves on the Museum of Pop Culture’s Youth Advisory Board. She writes for TeenTix, and her work can be found on the TeenTix blog and on the Encore Spotlight. Her writing tends to pertain to identity, the intangible, and things like race and sexuality. In particular, how those intangible ideas interact with the tangible parts of identity like geography and family. When she’s not writing she can be found listening to new wave, listening to Taylor Swift, or binge-reading queer novels.