Things Muslim girls who like girls try not to think about by Sahar

When she kisses your cheek with her sticky plum-sweet lipstick

Don’t think about the living room with your grandmother’s quran on the shelf

And Jummah sermons over the masjid mic condemning homosexuality

And when she asks you to follow her to tiny cafe bathrooms

Don’t think about how your bottom row of teeth are crooked- don’t think,

try not to think at all, because they can probably smell

Rot and fear growing between the spaces of ribs, nebulous, spitting, splitting

When your chemistry teacher says queer people are a growing epidemic,

Don’t think about the chemicals swirling and mixing in your body-

Epidemic- like pathogen carrying microbes, rods and filaments, the singular

Aim to multiply and multiply and colonize and colonize; whatever

combination of elements that color your blood the wrong shade of red-

Don’t sit in class thinking about how you are just atoms imitating sentience and

Is it really so terrible (are you really so diseased)

if you want to hold a lover’s face in your hands like the winter sun

When you lie in bed, don’t think about the girl with the soda tab necklace and

pretty black cartwheeling hair- you’ll have dreams where you are not afraid

To press your face in the crook of her neck- lock and key-

You will wonder if forgiveness is a thing God reserves for other people- like

Easy love, the kind where you can holds hands down the street, share

A cat, a soup pot, a blanket, a wardrobe, a home, a life,

And still have heaven within reach and not a pyre with your name on it