Testimony By Aman Chishti

By The Rising Phoenix Review on July 13, 2024

Testimony

My best friend has tiny burns
dotted along her arms from her restaurant's fryers
like a garden of small and soldiering peonies,
little red-purple colony that must have looked
very long and hard,
must have suffered perennially arid discontent,
before sprouting merrily where it knew the air
would be hospitable
and the loam loving.

Half woman, half water, she weaves fluidly
through the arithmetic of commerce.
The booming tenor of family.
And of course, the train we take together,
of which we have grown weary passengers—
how the glenohumeral joint articulates.
Dengue and multiple sclerosis. A dilated
cardiomyopathy quiz from an earmarked textbook
as she fashions soup for dinner.
She's prepared it extra spicy because that's
how I like it.
She'd never admit it but I know how her affection looks,
sharply aureate and dense with lentils
on her stovetop.

I knew she was Palestinian before she said it.
What other nation could have forged the
enduring river of her blood?
What other mouth could deliver such
sinew and steel,
the undeniable alacrity of her nails, the
resolute and unflinching poetry of her stance,
silent as stone,
equanimous as the river that washes over it,
and still—despite it all—
the tenderness of her eyes,
two round zaytoun
persistent in their fragrance
like the homeland trees from
which they unfurled?

By Aman Chishti

Biography:

Aman Chishti is a second-year medical student at the University of Missouri. Her love for poetry was sparked by a grade school assignment and has persisted throughout her life. While earning her undergraduate degree in Public Policy and Administration, her poetry was selected to be featured in her undergraduate institution's literary journal, and as a medical student, a poem of hers was recently selected to be featured in the journal Capital Psychiatry. Following medical school, she plans on pursuing a career in child and adolescent psychiatry and continuing her lifelong devotion to the written word.