Jaia Hamid Bashir

Silver Alert

What syllable opens in the last breath,
what plea escapes the foxhole 
where even a rib becomes a bone to gnaw? 
What rattles out when the mind, 
a stranger starved, scrapes for vacancy 
in the roadside neon? 
Last night I passed such a sign, 
and there, in the ditch, 
an old man naked as a lamb, 
his hair a nest of forgetting, 
his eyes refusing rest, 
one blue, fixed, one rolling loose, 
a dove inside a hamster ball 
caught my face and held it 
longer than the horizon would allow. 
A young cop, not older than your sister, 
bent to him as if he were tidepool, 
fragile, restless, containing 
the ocean in miniature. 
She lifted his body into the cruiser, 
siren painting the alfalfa 
with red and blue brushstrokes, 
a counterfeit sunset. 
I ask you 
when such a man is found, 
or captured, 
what does he say? 
Mother? God? 
Or, the name of the star 
he once charted for his vanished wife? 
Do you hear it, too? 
Oh, that syllable, 
a moan braided with prayer, 
tongue fumbling toward geometry. 
This is not lament, 
but instruction. 
Watch this linguist:
bare soles grinding pebbles into teeth,
language cracking loose 
like ice floes in the dark. 
He is leaving again, 
his mouth shaping new syllables, 
an escape route in sound. 
From the ruined orbit of his eye
something germinates, 
searchlight, dull lamp,
flickering the only world 
we return to: 
mmmm—beloved. 

Jaia Hamid Bashir, the daughter of Pakistani immigrant artists, is the author of The Afterlife of Sweetness (Ohio State University Press, 2026) and the chapbook Desire/Halves (Nine Syllables, 2024). Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Image, The Rumpus, The Oxonian Review, and Narrative.