Afshan Shafi
Fabric
I knew you would regret the moon-vault, bloody splendor of your clothes, though snug in the bolts of silken medusas, and mitochondrial geishas scaling the bluffs of your shoulders, soon your riffs of breath were to became madrigals of speech the secret coil of your signature was a tide of wraiths a matrix of gnomes, petrified eyes and cabochon bones curling with a kind of muzzled, bardic energy, everything you touched pulsed with the motion of the dark; polluted vision was a result of ghosts holding hands in the hammock of your eyes the tops of trees were transformed by aureoles of soot seraphs stumbling about your ribs found body, vice, and lever on the acre of your faithlessness, everything was fated for the sewer of limbo, but your costumes would stay your civil gabardines, claret robe, scabbard of chambray webbed with folkgods your shrouds of rosebud were not only girlish entreaties to love but armaments against the assertion of grief, new in the envelope of your satins I am struck by the reefed glint of your strength, to wreck the eating silence; You, anatomist of clouds You, foundling of oceanic dark, editing, editing these treasures of the perpetual
Afshan Shafi lives in Lahore, Pakistan and has studied English Literature and International Relations at The University of Buckingham and Regent’s University London. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Clinic, Ala Champ Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, ditch, Full of Crow, New Asian Writing, I am not a silent poet, The Toucan, Mad Swirl, Visual Verse, Black Heart Magazine, and others. Her debut chapbook of poems Odd Circles was published by Readings (Pakistan) in 2014. She is the founding editor of the forthcoming Abbreviate Journal. Website: http://afshanshafi.com.
