June 9, 2025

Two Poems

by Trish Salah

This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Lambda Award-winning trans poet and scholar Trish Salah teaches us about the loneliness of inhabiting spaces beyond where borders demarcate in “Prayer Glitch” and “Blurred Witness”.

Use coupon code SWANAPRIDE25 for a discount on Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices and the special collection I Want Sky honoring martyred Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazy, valid through the end of June 2025.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

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When you try to speak of home
What comes out is kisses, birds

—Trish Salah

Prayer Glitch

One sister remembered, one not
One curated voiced in a song cycle
One divides the ocean, a drifter

It is difficult to be molten, alone
Drum the breakers and vanish
Teach the young, without force

Evacuated in silence, not knowing
As readin seed the horizon 
All thought only of glass 

Desired like a monitor nothing 
Hooking up, having had a sex
Arguing with heavy liquor, a mask 

Lonely through the park to the bar
Once could yet be taken up 
The act of only writing poetry

Center halve and childlike report
Sibling questions bred apart
Dare memory’s compassion

River of words, rushing cavities
Claimed seasonal every girl 
In plague, only to repeat

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Blurred Witness

What is required by this history? 
A rage muse, it is your body still 

Encircling the city of your lover
Wander the written path

When you try to speak of home
What comes out is kisses, birds

Past, another possible remove, 
How do you become a stranger?

Faces thinly papered over
despite how alike we look

Her past, or his, an awful trust
Without country or reference

To arrive I stay abed for days
Inside a house within another house

Try to retrace what was cast out
quiet 

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