two poems

by Sumayya Arshed

the smell of fear inside an uber

the car hums like a throat clearing before confession,

fear sits beside her, always by her side,

palpable as sweat sinking into vinyl seats,

palpable as the driver’s mirror tilted too low,

angled and hungry and drinking her whole without a word.

she sees women blur past the window, silent mouths

pressed into glass, shadows folded into absence,

their vanishing smudging the night into a darker black.

the wheel turns smooth, almost gloating,

each mile a grin stretched across the driver’s knuckles,

each turn a reminder that fear is inheritance,

but he wears it drunk, giddy,

while she holds it like a pulse that will not still.

her breath stumbles, incorrigible, uncontrolled,

but not irrational, never irrational,

for every woman has known this acrid smell that seeps

into the leather of cars, this sharp inheritance of moving metal

the lesson of fast roads:

that a woman is always too near an ending,

and fear,

fear is the only passenger

that has no drop off location.

the predicament of em dashes

sentences fall under suspicion now—

every fracture accused of fraud,

every pause mistaken for circuitry.

the em dash—

once a trembling breath,

once the human fracture that refused conclusion—

is suddenly evidence,

a counterfeit scar.

they whisper it belongs

not to the one who writes and bleeds at the margins

but to the faceless machine

that never dreams.

that will

never dream.

commas obey. and the period concludes.

but the em dash alone.                                                       

carries an unfinished thought,

the grief that interrupts speech

and still insists on being spoken.     

to outlaw it

is to outlaw faltering itself.

what body of language can survive

if its breath is forbidden?

language has always been a body of interruptions,

of rhythms, that resist the neat edge 

now,

if there is no place between suspicion and faith,

let the fracture remain—

the dash as bridge, as horizon—

where the human endures

even when no one believes it.

BIO: Sumayya Arshed is a writer based in Pakistan. Her poems appear in the anthologies As the Light Fades and Things the Moon Knew and are are published or forthcoming in The Marrow, Ultramarine Literary Review, Full House Literary, Inksight Magazine and underscore magazine. (Instagram @chaibiscitt)