Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.–—Lord Tennyson

Winter is my nightlong field. Cruel, yet yet after leaving my mother’s warm water, I wept snow. And when my tongue tastes the first flake, I quiet. Sometimes, I pull from my pocket a telescope. In the sky, light collapses, the moon cranked up like a cry signal. Last January, beneath a sky of scorpions, fish, the bull all scintillating–— I found a girl’s body. Seven bodies. Sister bodies. Grieving for the fate of their father, Atlas, forced to carry the heavens forever, they kill themselves. Zeus pins them as a clot of winter stars. On the third day, my mother’s fat tongue flexes as she sounds the ink blue glyphs of my name, each letter rattling her knucklebones as she writes it. A fearful undertaking, God-like task. Yet the stars were named by people like us. Choose one word. Say it over and over until a blaze builds in the basin of your mouth:

لنّظم Alnilam, String of Pearls راقصة Ar-Raqis, The Trotting Camel اخرج من النهر Achemar, End of the River

I could have been called after seven anythings: seven seas, seven heavens, seven ahruf the Holy Qur’an was revealed in. Instead I am named after seven hot orbs of gas, the ghosts of goddesses, daughters dangling in sorrow. When I sleep, God threads me through a catasterism. I am embraced as their eighth sister burning brightly in the backdrop of blackness. We evade المنطقة Mintaqa–— Orion’s pursuit for our love, flash paths for the lost, catch and groom the wish a little girl whispers. I wish we could bless ourselves into fast comets, firecrackers, the pearled wilderness of the moon. And our fathers tie us in a knotted braid: both work too hard, carry so much weight on their shoulders. Fifty years ago, my father learned resistance is found above, in the stars held together by their own gravity. How their heat owns the whole night, yet a boy can’t even keep his home. Since our last move he told me, Each of my wounds carries a wounded man, and–—snow in my eyes, snow in my mouth, wet hands iced speech, snow soaking my socks red–— I believed him. I want to ask him about the scar. And when do you feel most weary? Do you find yourself holding up ceilings, sweeping crumpled lifespans off the floor the way I do? Lorca gives me a vague trembling of stars, says, Place these in your father’s heart. Says, The rose is as white as his pain. I see my father’s rush: time hugs him tight as he stuffs a suitcase before fajr, sneaks into a smoky slipstream from tanks at the corner, stiff-thin shoulders shrouded in morning mist. When he first met snow his words became corpses. There was no name for it. In the blizzard his eyes never shut, face pressed into the ground, cold avalanche up his nostrils so he can smell its history. Before he wakes I leave a bowl of melted snow by his bed. The winter water coils him into his own constellation. From my window, his soul dives into darkness scissor kicking into a pool of space. For once, he is held: erected mosque, mountained, inexhaustible. In the sky, he isn’t a body anymore–— endless and ethereal, waiting to be noticed, waiting to be named.

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