Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of poetry collections "Kohl and Chalk" and "Baker of Tarifa." Her latest work, "Ghazal Cosmopolitan," is a book of essays and poems exploring the culture and craft of the ghazal form. Winner of the San Diego Book Award for poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize and multiple Pushcart nominations, Zeest Hashmi's poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu, and has appeared in anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in McSweeney's "In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth." She has taught in the MFA program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence and her work has been included in the Language Arts curriculum for grades 7-12 (Asian American and Pacific Islander women poets) as well as college courses in Creative Writing and the Humanities.
Website: http://shadabhashmi.com
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi I felt in the pit of my stomach the proximity to my school as the car approached the Air Force base and the diminutive Air Force planes in (almost pretty) earth tones became visible on the runway through the large gates. The car would now turn into the school lane and…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi What they did not understand at the PTV station was that it's in my nature to be elsewhere, nodding attentively one minute, gone the next. I didn't understand it either, the tendency to let myself be stolen into another world, switching between here and there like flashes of moon jellies, now…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Dear Partitioned Dead I write to you of folding, tucking, burying side by side. The silk you worried the centuries into being, has arrived; bolts of it. But when we opened the trunks, all we saw was a smooth tongue: Urdu's cascade, a shimmer in ruins. We had to snap shut…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Torkham, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, felt like an utter release— as if we were random things, a fistful of summer insects set free in space. This, of course, was before the Soviet war. I was in elementary school. Dwarfed by the standoffish ice blue mountains on the road to…