One Poem by Fizza Abbas

 

Am I a ghost in the dollhouse? 

 

I am a manufactured product, 

whom they sweetly call the adopted child. 

I want them to know I'm not special, 

just an average old woman running errands, 

mistaking baskets for bouquets and fruits for colours. 

I see colours turning green, white, red in front of me, 

like a policeman stopping a car and giving someone a red ticket. 

(Oh you, belly button! Did it again? Didn't I warn you?) 

Parking lights are a mathematical measure of vibgyor. 

Love is not a beautiful red heart, 

but an old mystery woman begging for some bucks. 

Naughty is a mix of an infant's leg and a ball, 

stupid is an old, brown trunk filled with tattered clothes. 

Images dance in my head all day long, 

like a scoop of peanut butter asserting its dominance on stale bread. 

They call me an alien; don't they understand autism? 

Life is a frisky ball, a game of throw and fetch, 

a dog whistle that works on everyone but dogs. 

Dogs are humans, humans too; this allegory excites me. 

Mother told me to listen to old, classical music, 

but she could never see clefs going horizontally, vertically, 

and then diagonally before losing into an oblivion, 

a pitch-black dark, no-room to exhale my breath. 

My husband recently told me I'm a savant 

because I tried to create some cuss words as a defence, 

a language when I was a little girl, 

and could recreate things just after looking at them. 

But it doesn't make me intelligent; my bullies called me a dumbo, 

their words shrieked through a thin chord line 

between my temples, 

cutting through my mind like wind over an air foil, 

piercing from front to back, leaving turbulence in their wake. 

I believed them because they said so while punching me, 

leaving me with a cheek that bled like a laughing joker, 

maniacally, with pom-poms, in a fanfare 

where kids are allowed to play hide and seek 

on orange and black trampolines, chasing laughter 

which echoes in the room, getting caught by two gloves 

from nowhere. 

Parents assuming their kids found friends 

little do they know they only have plastic dolls with smeared 

lipstick and unkempt tresses that make them scary 

for the world but not the kids 

because they love to play tickle-tackle with them. 

Their soft, growing skulls, carrying ink with ice 

to melt the words they are creating. 

Nobody knows it's not a game 

but a ghost house where kids are ghosts themselves, 

shadowing the world that could save them.

 

Fizza Abbas is a writer based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is fond of poetry and music. Her work has appeared in more than 100 journals, both online and in print. Her work has also been nominated for Best of The Net and shortlisted for Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2021.