Tobi Kassim

Compound Dispersed

How the family name came
To scatter from high desert
arabic       bedouin no stable
mouth to gather
 the dispersion
break apart
              distribute
The family name handed out
like       dust
in awakened wind
daddy said he didn’t
want our name to mean
divided                  but we kept it
since our papers hadn’t
                been denied yet

Wind body problem

The shape of being inside of what’s inside me –

the curtain that fell or rose inside me
darkened part of me to other parts of me

                 wind brewing in a radiograph
                                                                            strings threaded through my ribcage back into the stubbled carpet

fringes of a heavy curtain                 the sun sutured the yard and the living
                room through gold accents in a red weave
the divisions i thought were inside me        red brick of the yard from creamy interior


of my eyelids overexposed to flare               film catching fire on the wheel    light through both sides of 
                words: the shot through result

on cellulose indexes september’s late resplendence
               under the family tree         crabapples leaping to bruise on the bricks

that color           brown flesh reddens in the edges of old picture frames

color: bruised carpet of crabapples
first i was a glass door then a window then a screen at night         eyelid framed the life

before my body                 closed on living in the body too


life after the body – i knew who i was       was wind
borne in the ear bone first.

i know the breath’s not voided
                 in the empty house
the ducts sigh us out



                                                                 the wind on my eyelid
                                               world breath flushes the curtain.
                                                my mind’s a net.

Tobi Kassim’s writing has been published in The Volta, Chicago Review, The Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, Four Way Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by Undocupoets, and Cave Canem. His chapbook Dear Sly Stone was published by Spiral Editions.