Superposition by Nishat Ahmed
Associate poetry editor Hannah Cajandig-Taylor on today’s bonus poem: Each time I read this poem, something new arises. Nishat Ahmed’s “Superposition” feels especially timely right now: a lovely and harrowing narrative of beginnings and endings, beauty and destruction, and the complications that arise when straddling the in-between. How do we grasp at the slivers of life that seem to be gliding away in all directions? If we learn anything from Ahmed’s piece, it’s that we may never know the right answer.
Superposition
Doesn’t it bewilder you
that in the time it has taken
you to read this, four people
are already dead and if,
depending on your reading speed,
you are this far into the poem,
a dozen babies are now crying
for the first time? And I think all the time
about how many worlds begin
and end in the time the streetlight
outside my apartment turns green
and the time it takes for someone
impatient and inconsiderate to honk
at a quarter to midnight. But perhaps
I am wrong in thinking this abrupt noise
is selfish, perhaps it is self-defense
or a warning to another careless driver.
Maybe this brief moment of sound is the divide
between one death and another.
Maybe this honk was meant for me,
to keep me awake because the driver knows
sleep is just a practice of death.
When I shut my eyes this world is gone
and I am dead; everyone asleep is dead
for a moment. Next to me, my wife,
asleep, is dead as she dreams,
and isn’t it a fucking miracle
that tomorrow we will
wake up and somehow be
alive?
Nishat Ahmed is a Bangladeshi-American residing in the Midwest. He’s an Illinois native with a deep love for Fall Out Boy, The Notebook, and Chipotle. He received his MFA in poetry from Old Dominion University. His work has been published by Sobotka, Words Dance, The Mochila Review, Into the Void, The Academy of American Poets, The Tampa Review, and has been performed at TEDxUIUC and AWP. His first chapbook, Field Guide for End Days comes out summer 2020 from Finishing Line Press, and his second, Brown Boy, is forthcoming in late 2020 from Porkbelly Press.
