Translation
by Tosh Sherkat
a ghazal is a box you place your hands inside to hide the holes (in you)
[ho-hesh me-ko-nam bozourk ha-neigh gorbonnet baram]
you learn to build the dams to save a drop of audience.
[ho-hesh me-ko-nam bozourk ha-neigh gorbonnet baram]
holes the size of blackberries where a house now stands, where a house now mans.
no contest to [houbam] not the slightest word. dam,
upon dam. prior, the river travelled the leased timber—you watch the water for glyphs,
the severed I’s of stolen land. “good” or not is for them.
here is where you learned you were born and it still did not make the difference. make you
belong.
question: who/where you are, sort of honey comb, barcode.
you come from homeward vacation. you tongue a few words of which you know no
untranslated meaning.
here is a threshold, a dam. [h-alle] means empty. civilian holes, country.
a ghazal is a box where you place your hands and come out empty.
“please, Big House, I sacrifice myself for you.”
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Tosh Sherkat is a Persian-Doukhobor settler-of-colour in their last year of study at the University of Victoria in creative writing, on W̱SÁNEĆ land. They were raised on Autonomous Sinixt territory, in Nelson, BC. Their writing appears at Terrain.org, Existere, EVENT, Plenitude, CBC, Megaphone, Asparagus, PulpMag, Megaphone, and This Side of West magazine. They served as the poetry editor for This Side of West’s 21st issue, as a reader for Watch Your Head, and as an interviewer for the Climate Disaster Project. @tosherkat on Twitter.