My name is Podrigotuma and one of the obsessions I have in poetry is poem that's an exploration

of time and that can sound like some kind of experimental physics project in poetry, but

it's not really because I find myself thinking of friendship in time when I think of the

question of time. This year it'll be 40 years since I met my friend Jean-Aid. We were

both in the same village and through weddings and funerals and grief and joy and knowing

each other well and nothing in touch for years and then reconnecting through coming out, through

stories of survival. To mention her is to mention what it is that time does, how time can

expand and contract, a poem can do that, but a friendship is the true home about what

time can do.

Old to my home girls by Safiya Ilhil. Smelling of orange rind of cardamom, most beautiful

girls in the world, wake up bitch, we're getting waffles, you can keep crying but you're

going out. My marriages, my alibis, my bright and hardy stalks of protea and all I know

of love. I learned at 13 dialing basmas home phone by heart to three way call whatever

boy so that weeks later when the phone bill came only basmas familiar number beside the

time stamp clearing my name. Basma herself staying awake for hours to hang up the phone

after. You who send pictures of your rashes to the group text and long voice notes from

the bathtub, you're laughter echoing against the tiles, you who scatter the world's map,

piling into cheap bosses and budget airlines, four of us asleep in my dorm bed, six of us

overflowing my studio apartment, false lashes for weeks after, like commas in my every pillow

case. You clog my toilet and admit it. You text me screenshots from the Gucci fashion

show getting rich so I can get you this. And when I lived alone and that man followed

me one night home from the sixth train of Lexington and into the hallway tried for hours to break

...