POEM FOR SOMEONE I CARE ABOUT

Shazia Hafiz Ramji


“You just get in my head,” you said. The admission itself
the gesture I cannot bear: the one where your hand

will have been on my hair, while asleep
like my father’s hand when I was a kid. Or, like the phone

against my cheek, when you spoke of millipedes and spiders
and I was a child again, not listening to what you said

because the sound of your voice is the horizon that folds out
of itself, like clothes in the sun, turning in the wind

pulling bright tongues from the black air, clothes so close to my skin.
I will have lost my breath when you bring out the flask of whisky

at the airport. If you were anyone else, I would have the face to ask you in
once more with feeling, but this is you pretending to give me a guise

because you’re afraid I’ve not caught up to you, but I’ve been listening
to you and I’m still listening to you, and I want to ask you:

Is it too much to want to cry with you?
Because your hands make me miss your father for you.





Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In 2019, the CBC named her as a "writer to watch." Her writing has recently appeared in Poetry Northwest, Music & Literature, and Canadian Literature. She is a columnist for Open Book and is currently at work on a novel.