Today the 19-year anniversary of the war on us. I know not to dig for long. I catch my reflection in profile and don’t think terror. My face a mountain, my face full of tall pines, volcano face, my face without any nefarious intentions, my face the color of the sky in LA the color of wildfire, my face rock-brown, molten.
Maryam A. Ghafoor (she/they)
Maryam Ghafoor is a queer Pakistani-American Muslim poet from Illinois whose work has been accepted in The American Poetry Review, SOFTBLOW, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.
“Terror” was written on September 11th, 2020 during fall of the first year of the pandemic, when we were all mainly indoors, afraid of the coming surges. The vaccine wasn’t available yet. We desperately needed connection and found it online. I remember checking Instagram that morning, realizing what day it was. In the US, alternating images were shared about the anniversary of 9/11 and the devastating wildfires in LA. I saw myself in profile in my apartment’s kitchen window and thought about who I was, how I would be seen in connection to these images and wrote about that feeling.
