Impasse

Hasti

Body is a bus stop: thought doctors could lift me

out. Without yearning, I shake. Light so split in absorption.

Little will steered into steering the ship. Not always redemption

in the small things. What twenty-year-old lies in rich dark

for days, trying to sleep through youth? What thirty-year-old

still numbs the tongue, drags? I am ready to renege

on this living-fantasy. I want my own world, with a clear-cut answer

to questions I can’t conceive, mind so weakened

with daily sores: where is the outline, the map of life, the slice

the block the 5D mess. Maybe every violent day

is like this. Grainy, with a knot in the centre. Made of hot

spearing lines. The jeopardy for real. Rat heart

lazy, wet-heavy with empire’s congealed guilt—seven minutes—fourteen—thirty-three—fifty-six—despair

at responding forever. Like sour milk, translucent garlic,

fungus—no reclamation, no beauty, no nobility, no message, the days

add up to what they add up to, day after day after day after STOP

Hasti is a poet and writer living in South East London. A member of the inaugural Southbank New Poets Collective and the Ledbury Poetry Critics, they are the recipient of the 2023 White Review Poet's Prize, the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry, and have recently published poems in bathmagg, zindabad zine, and Pfeil magazine. They have co-written short sci-fi film DIGGING, produced by Film4. Hasti also hosts open mic and poetry night Fresh Lip, and its sister show for Montez Press Radio, Fresh Air.