Asiya Wadud

field notes for topiary

1. The year was held together by a white dress

2. I held out for the dunes

3. The regalness of them was in the enveloping tide

4. A blueprint is a resonate hand

5. So delimited then boundless

6. We were perilous in the drowning

7. The will for continuity was alarming

8. The valleys were as giving as the peaks

9. We were conditioned to smell the stench

10. We are okay with not naming it

9. High tide is enveloping

8. I want to be contained

7. All many silence becoming

6. The equanimity anyone can name us

5. An architecture is brutal by nature

4. The geography in the vastness

3. The vacillating vastness

2. Leave something to be built

Asiya Wadud is a poet and third grade teacher. Her newest poems can be found in the Chicago Review, SUBLEVEL and Sixth Finch and she has pieces forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing, Makhzin, and 111O/10, among others. She was a 2017 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space Artist in Residence and was a finalist for a 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. In 2017, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs published her chapbook, we, too, are but the fold and her first book, crosslight for youngbird, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2018. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she loves animals.