Jai Hamid Bashir

THE NEIGHBORS

Narcoleptic porch light swings envious,
an electric siren for fireflies marking the bluedark. Standing underneath

yellowed nimbus, watching the collie sleepwhimper
at my feet showing gleams of her teeth. Tremor of stars

and waving grass perform a semaphore
signaling to sleep what cannot sleep. Looking for silence

in the dead apiary, buzzed in syntax
from heat without end. A bright and common moon emerges

baying for canines—desperate for
devotion. Moths—worldmakers for
night in their desire,

and their eternal worship—light, something had to shape
those bedfellows in rhyme. Closing each window, a sign

in pursuit of safeguarding our unlovely hearts from fates
of fatal surrender. Glows ripening. Fattening like peaches—

all the lightbulbs growing. In hums of cities
below, arriving like a dead star’s flash, I
notice

a set of soft eyes in someone’s driveway. There she is, exhaling
profanities for a lover who has left for the last time; she leaves

all her lights on, ashes her cigarette, and
waves — as if I am an old friend. It doesn’t
matter

if I make myself dinner
or keep on waving—I’ll still wake up bloomed
with this hunger

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Jai Hamid Bashir is a Pakistani-American and second-generation artist. A graduate of Columbia University, her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, the American Poetry Review, Guernica, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and others. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.