Night Sequins
By Sophia Naz
This week, SWWIM and Matwaala are coming together to celebrate women writers of South Asian heritage with a week of poetry and a SWWIM x Matwaala writing residency and reading at The Betsy-South Beach featuring visiting writer Nina Sudhakar and local writer Carolene Kurien. (The reading will take place on September 11 at 7:00 pm. Please join us in person or via Instagram Live or Facebook Live!)
Matwaala was launched in 2015 to increase the visibility of diasporic South Asian poets (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan) in the mainstream American literary landscape. The name Matwaala in a transferred sense suggests the intoxication of poetic creativity. Matwaala showcases the diversity within the South Asian community—and within the Indo-American community.
A note from Matwaala: Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, is honored to join hands with SWWIM in celebrating a week of South Asian poetry that celebrates Matwaala’s tenth anniversary. A thoughtfully curated selection of women poets offer us a constellation of rich poetry this week. Together with SWWIM, we affirm poetry’s power to bridge distances, and amplify voices.
(A poem series) 1 Do you sometimes feel that your life is a sequel to a first act you can’t remember? Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise? I mean who wants the terror-imprint of an unfamiliar fluorescence coupled with first breath and squeal and pull of gravity despite cradling. Night of amnion sea anemone followed by night cribbing as emblem of first separation 2 Consider how a sequin is a round wound a moon with a hole in its heart already prepped for the needle that pierces and pins it to your absence. 3 Sequins seeking shelter from nightmares nest in encampments of eyelids Needle is to finger as knit is to skein Sequin comes from *sikka, your Urdu purse coins a glitter of language, sheds a snake. Hangnails bleed inconsolable. 4 Insomnia is your unchecked baggage on the night flights home the cities also half asleep, their coverlet of light bulbs sprouting feverish impatience. 5 Tasks upon landing: memorize the taste of a freshly rolled moon swim through thousand-layered air turn your pockets inside out, watch America clatter to the ground eons of small change & cold nights melt ice on a hot side - walk walk 6 Humid night evades all metal detectors smuggles her skin hue midst you a sequence spilling in all directions home *sikka: coin, the first sequins were coins stitched to fabric. This fashion traveled to Italy where it became zecchino, and from there to France where it became known as sequin.
Sophia Naz has authored the poetry collections Bark Archipelago (Weavers Press, San Francisco & Red River India), Open Zero (Yoda Press), Pointillism (Copper Coin), Date Palms (City Press), Peripheries (Cyberhex ), and a biography, Shehnaz (Penguin Random House.) Her work appears in The Academy of American Poets, Poetry Daily, The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Poets, The Night Heron Barks, Singing in the Dark, Berfrois, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rattle, and The Adirondack Review, amontg others. See sophianaz.com.
09/11 / Poetry Reading and Conversation, a collaboration with Matwaala, with visiting poet-in-residence Nina Sudhakar & local poet Carolene Kurien / The BBar at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live (rsvp here) and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
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