fahima ife: California Poets Part 11, Three Poems

fahima ife

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

fahima ife

Three Poems

Pudendum

On the slide over, Imari says I want to talk about beauty. At first I think he means asymmetries. I think the word invagination is lazy. No one talks like this unless folded inside itself, inside itself. Orgasm, now that's a great word. Whoever was on word parole that day did gasp work. Like for real forreal. A rosemary bloom curling open, out. Look escarole, a flirty chasm. What really is a flower. There's something about jasmine that feels exquisitely vestigial. For the second time on campus a young gorgeous human says ethereal like eeth-ree-el. I try to hold my face neutral wonder is any of this is happening, or just late gestational friction. How exactly to become a refuge in a sea of cringe. On the beach I grin when this puppy runs up, licks my hands. His human says he really loves the color purple. 

Spring, or Raccoon

She was made as a series of textures responding to delicacies of immediate eruptions. Perhaps residual ones stemming from childhood. When she was a child, she stimmed every chance she got. No one around her knew it was stimming or even what stimming was, or even that she was the kind of human who needed to stimulate herself to soothe her own nervous system. Or they were also sensitive. But she did stim in ways signaling precisely what was wrong. Like opening her eyes wide, closing them tight might have said something about her liver. She was irritated, most often, by her immediate surroundings whose overall resonance was aggravation. These people, she had been assigned to, wanted her to call them names. Why did she have to use proper adjectives, when everyone else was saying proper nouns. She referred to her biological parents by their first names, because her friends did the same. At home they said, call me mommy, call me daddy. These were not her parents. Why is the word rent inside this word meaning caretaker. She was easily angered by little everyday things like this, or the texture of her own hair soft against her neck. A tag in the back of her shirt, harassing her skin. A bright shock of light, when exiting a movie theater. Walking circles inside a crowded shopping mall. All these people acting. Bright metallic boxes housed inside one, then another. Selling riddles no one needed, or thought they needed, would someday need. We happily sang shape notes of our objective reality. Somewhere warm, fuzzy, before birth she helped construct this ligature of this particular brass signification. Playing outside, the hot metal against her soft sweaty hands created calluses. The sound of her mother's voice sent her blood on edge nearly every time. Clash of sound, sound. Clash of class. A dog barking. A child crying. Sound of glass jar breaking up some rough interval. Between painful things, when humans relaxed enough to play at getting along, things were happy. Inside her immediate household, which was always with her. Did other people's home life look as variously amalgamated as hers did. She loved her family so much they began dying. Is what she told herself, staring at a full moon, asking to return to wherever it was she might have come from before this war against people like her on Earth. She held on too tight, so they disappeared, like a cube of sugar dissolving in a pool of water. When she forgot to sleep, which was often, she developed dark circles around her eyes, which she was never sure if it was too much blood or too little.

Telepathic Flight School

My students communicate with me all hours of day, most days, including weekends. None of this occurring through any of the proper channels like designated digital tools, but through our extramammalian features, our synesthetic connective membranes touching, touching ether. Something like, not like, a hive mind. One-hundred in my immediate orbit, thousands more beyond mist. A thin bright ping in my right ear, tunneling, pivoting, now left. Is anyone listening when I say I hear inside consciousness, especially when no one else is actually present. Just voices inside pneuma, inside pores, inside portals, calling soft electric purples. It gets lonely inside the quarter, beating it overhead. People die. Get sick. Fly back home to the Valley because things got wild again on the coast. Get out the orange flowers. Our dead are home, singing our songs, our ears ringing. I am not a Lecturer but they paid me a lot of money this quarter to act like one on tv. But  in real life, I prefer Weed Farmer, where no one ever sees me. Being a specialist, and all, it's easy to slide up and down scales, dart in and out of velvet blue curtains. Feel a rhythm I first felt when young looking up into bright light space. There were these gestures you could make it appear, so easy, as if out of thin air. As it permits. But really I am disabled. At a podium I say, I have a very difficult time going from A to B. Which is how we began eight weeks ago on the edge of my last blood cycle. I was standing at a stable. I was dying slow. Everybody sat there watching with these smiles painted bright their faces. I was raw, burnt umber. I was erosion. I was rising from our ashen cave. I was throwing out my feathered limbs. Signaling forests, signaling rain. I was was.  

Author Bio:

fahima ife is an Indigenous poet, professor, and editor, a California native based in California. She is the author of Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) and Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, mercury firs, Obsidian, Indiana Review, and other places. She is associate professor of Aesthetics & Poetics at UC Santa Cruz. She co-founded and is co-editor of the poetry micropress, LUCIUS.