Prayer Without a Sutrah - Tamer Said Mostafa

Maghrib

Ask me whose liberation 
I am in service towards
and I exalt the blasphemy 
James Brown provoked
when a sheikh once 
forbade me from music.

Tame a wandering gaze
by inscribing figure eights
on the pavement 
with only your eyes
and see how solemnly 
desire dies.

My parents ordered
virginity until marriage,
and when I relinquished it
as a teenager, their harvest 
of false syllables burst
at its artery.

Isha

If you know exile,
you know impiety comes
twice a lifetime,
so save your elegy 
for the fugitives you've 
crowned by the hour.

The man entering heaven
because he repented
after killing 99 people 
is the supervisor who tempered
my Muslimness so he could
eat it with a spoon.

A white high school teacher 
says he wants to fuck my mother
because Muslim fathers are
unlawful, and the slur I threw 
back at him was a chair-desk 
that missed by six inches.

My community abandoned me
for a crime I didn't commit,
and the good Muslim 
who used to count God's names
on his fingers until they 
turned purple, died in their fire.

Fajr

My graduate professor urges 
guerilla warfare on the page
for countrymen who cannot 
answer every prayer
without manacles
wrapped in flammable cloth.

Your virtue signaling 
is an entry wound
through an empty straightjacket, 
but don't waste yourself. 
I'm just as unimaginative 
and comorbid as you.

Dhuhr

I hate my tattoos 
for how translucent 
they've become, but would
cauterize new ones
just to curse the zealot 
who cast brimstone first.

My Ramadan make-up days 
must be in the hundreds,
but the one worth it the most
was for drinking Tokyo Teas 
until I passed out at Macaroni Grill 
with a crostini in mouth.

In fifth grade, I had to apologize
before the school for mocking 
the crucifixion as unrequited 
love, why we praise Jesus 
with replica missions made 
of plaster and country music. 

The next sheikh asks
why we can't wake up
for prayer when Americans 
walk their dogs before sunrise
lest we enjoy the devil 
pissing in our ears.

Asr

If there's an afterlife,
let it be one in which
the gay bars that saved me
are always swarming with
the stardust and cocaine
I wore like a fortress.

A therapy client says prayer
should be shatterproof 
for people pulling shrapnel
from their children, while another
won't fast for a God
who mortalizes homelands.

How peaceful was the night
I OD’d beneath a gooseneck lamp
with headphones looping 
a Gaelic song about funeral rites
and the anxiety of reconciliation
that goes unspoken?

Nobody should condemn 
the dead     for prayer to purify
its hues through an assemblage,
unwoven and suspenseful,
but when the living 
censure you first, fire away.