INGLAND
after Zaffar Kunial’s ‘Ings’
The bedroom air becomes amniotic when you think of leaving
again. This time: no party, no blue flag Xed onto the wall.
Only the agitations of dust waiting lifetimes to settle
in wet lungs. Hajrah called earlier. You both avoided
the matter entirely – as if this isn’t what you’re known for.
Leaving. The word wears itself. That arching throw of an eav
into the familiar water of an ing. You live your life in ings.
Breathing. Blinking. Moving but somehow lodged
in their stillness. Ings. Pockets of persistence rattling at
their doors. Tensions stopped short of release. There are ings
hiding in plain sight, like the ing that goes before land
in your birth country’s name, which was never your father’s
and only partly your mother’s. Or the ing that replaces the other
in brother to create bring, as in Bring me to my brother,
Ingland is invading ! And sometimes, there are ings soldered
shut, like the ing that was nearly your unarrival twenty-four years
ago when you somersaulted the umbilical cord around
your neck, burned blue as they marked the line
where they would open your mother – more than you had done
already. She bore two sons that day: you and the German
she had long forgotten, something only the cradle of anaesthetic
could beckon from her. It was a German word, angst, that held
the woman who held you first. Not your mother – someone
braided in you more deeply. But back then, all you knew
before language, before love, was calloused brown
hands discovering your own, warm Urdu and zeera hushed
over your skin, and hospital light defrosting your eyes
before the world, before this day where all things begin and begin
and you are beginning still.
ZAIN RISHI is a writer and bookseller from Birmingham, currently based in Edinburgh. He was highly commended in the Poetry Wales Award 2024-25 and is a Young Poets Network prizewinner. His poetry has featured in wildness, Fourteen Poems, Gutter, Propel and various anthologies. His debut pamphlet is forthcoming with The Emma Press.
‘Ingland’ was first published in the winter 2024/25 print issue (no. 98) of Oxford Poetry, after placing third in the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize, judged by Rachel Long. Illustration (above) by Anina Takeff, commissioned for the issue.
This year’s edition of the Oxford Poetry Prize is currently open for entries:
The prize is awarded annually by Oxford Poetry for a single unpublished poem and is open to poets writing in English around the world.
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