Arachnida
God sent a web, its filaments
a hymn of deception, a net of mercy
to save the prophet from his enemies.
Another story goes time folded into itself—
a wrinkle, a trapdoor,
and believers woke decades later,
their dog’s paws pressed like relics
at the mouth of the cave.
This is how time travel
occurs in The Quran.
And so, spiders, holy architects,
I cup one in my palm,
a minor prophet with eight sermons
ready to scatter across the yard.
I watch its legs stretch
as if testing the patience of God.
Hours dissolve.
And this ruin—this ruin.
What seed birthed the fig,
the wasp cocooned inside it,
its abdomen a clock wound to break?
I think of it resting on my arm,
its weight negligible,
yet enough to tilt the whole day.
I think of the belly button,
my old mouth concave with secrets,
my phantom mouth, how I’ve taught
it to swallow ash, to taste
the burn without complaint.
A fire is a hungry thing.
I know because I’ve fed it—
offered it my name,
my mirrored and endless hours,
even the spider, once.
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Aperture
Take one of me, you said. To prove I lived here. I framed you in a blue window— you were the shape
you made me hold. A notebook in Bogotá, an Americano cooling on a table beside you. Afterward,
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corn tortillas, ceviche, lime, and orange are fragrant as young planets’ skin. It was summer, myth-spun
and leaping. Its lungs were my twin. I couldn’t bear the silver weight of your camera; it’s lithe
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brutality and vertigo. My hands fail at aeronautics. The wings I carry beat counter to instinct, a bird
confounded by its flight. Just do your best, you said, as though effort could thread clarity through an
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aperture. I move through openings like water down a jagged throat. Love was once a headless god. You
whispered recently I could convince myself to love a tree. And so, you also love the songbird inside
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its branches, this feral fool spiraling toward the sun. These light-years— deliberate as they are endless.
Your photographs soften motion that burns the walls of a house. God exists in such vacancies, you said.
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You left your camera with me—an animal too shy to stay, too loyal to leave. I’ve never guided light,
only known openings. I am that pomegranate splitting its red secrets, its numinous ache, its stain
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of wanting to be revealed.
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The Portal
In the thick tongue of night, in another
life, I was swimming with you
in the blue of your childhood pool
sunny and acrid with chlorine stings
and first kisses. The dog—black, luminous—
spoke in stars only California
could offer. In the pool, I left you
dredges of my long, red Indian hair.
The silt of your acres, your boyhood thrown
wide as a porch door. I was with you,
vesper-quiet, with the other escaped
animals, crouched in the hills.
The hills orange-lit with dusk’s small ruin;
ribs sharp with exile. The windows
looked back at us. your hand—
cupped to my ear like a question—
reflecting the needle that tore
the smallest of portals,
into my lobes where I hung pearls heavy
with the scented ache of the moon.
In a language neither of us needed
spoken underwear since before
we had the ballast of names. I knew
your cannonballs, the wet slap
of your skin, And the sun-baked towel
waiting to dry the weight of us. The way
water holds a body without
granting it permanence.
Jaia Hamid Bashir, born to Pakistani immigrant artists, is the author of the poetry collection The Afterlife of Sweetness (Ohio State University Press, 2026) and the chapbook Desire/Halves (Nine Syllables, 2024). The winner of the 2024 Charles B. Wheeler Prize and the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize, she holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in the American West with her partner.