@Allah
by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
In a seaside desert port
that wasn’t yet a city
our grandfather built a wide house
and called it gulistan
There were no roses there
just the new government
four children that would be seven and a porch
where he stitched shoes and mixed paste
for paper maché book bindings
He counted buds
and tended love birds
built their cage and bedecked it
in blue and green and red
foil this and gota that
a cage the cat got into
in front of the open water tankard
the children got into
during this or that fatal game
Loose with life
while their father cycled home
in starched and ironed whites
polished porch stitched black leather shoes
a narrow mustache
we now associate with genocide
What is reverence anyway
who writes the reverence rules
After our grandmother died
he developed a taste for Western sweets
Flintstones pushpops and cokes and nerds
Of all the things he typed
and the typing was profuse
none changed the course of history
Like the verses of the Qur’an
rendered in @ signs
which he used as a coiled pixel
taxing the Smith-Corona
Coronamatic with his gridded plan
Let’s hate the names of things
like this
Before they changed the world with typewriters
the Smith brothers manufactured firearms
Cartridge and ribbon
bullet and thermal transfer
Syracuse and gulistan
Verses laid out in rows of @
seven @s in a vertical row
to make an alif
@s like a fallen E
to make a tashdeed
He did the whole Qur’an this way
At some point in paleography
they discovered this sign filling in
for the A of Amen or Ameen
in a Bulgarian version
of a fourteenth century Greek chronicle
Why and for whom or does
The Book short circuit this question
A smaller selection I have
is a better plot for dirt ministrations
just sura 8 ayah 46
inna Allaha maaAa al sabireen
Allah is with the patient ones
laid out in vertical reflection
its geometry a formal garden
hemmed by squares of @
looking in four directions
paths and hedges of invocation
borders of apostrophe
trees of hail and leaves of call
I wonder did he think
his helical pixels looked like roses
I wonder did he count
the buds in every verse
____
About the poet: Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb grew up in Albany, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and studied Comparative Literature at Columbia and also earned a PhD at Columbia University in 2014, with a dissertation entitled “Epidemiology of Terror: Health, Horror, and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature.” Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in 3 Quarks Daily, Discourse, the Los Angeles Review of Books, BookForum, Boston Review, Triple Canopy, the Bennington Review, Public Pool, and Syndicate Lit. Raza Kolb is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Williams College, where she teaches postcolonial theory and literature. She also currently holds the Edward W. Said Fellowship at Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities, and is visiting expert scholar in Women’s Studies at City College, New York. She is completing a scholarly book about Islam and the epidemic imaginary in colonial letters, and a collection of poems called Janaab-e Shikva, after the Pakistani poet Iqbal. 
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