NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Jameen translates into English as soil or earth, DIGGING:

	...I shave hairs to the shape of a passport photo.
	Into the good skin, steeling along
	the top end of the picture, a straight incision
	until blob by seamless blob, over
	the Stanley knife, a rivering of blood.
 
	Once under the fold, down to the roots,
	nerve-hand holds for slicing 
	level the parallel lines of a photo.
	Leaning deeper so the unconscious
	deep so the gore geometric be heaped up,
	I drop the silvery haft, the leg, 
	lug back the flap.
 
	I hear a cry from some of myself.
	So this is me. This
	jameen. This meat
	to which I war myself.
	This.

	Peeling from her sari. She bleaches under
	the 100w light. She stills the jangle of jewellery.
	She holds. As she was well told. No flicker
	to his fire. Just this time, she'll tilt her head
	across the bolstered vein of the mattress
	along her side. Closes her eyes as a fly
	nibbles on a palm. She has played her part...

	lightens the hold on the Holsten Pils,
	holding on to the last of the warm flat drink

	... I could make us gora food
	after your den at the English job
	if that's what it takes, as you settee,
	ungreji pouring from the tele...

	...three of us, each carrying a pan of cold water.
	Then we swept away the bonnet-leaves 
	of gold to the brown of our former colour.

	... when those Indians are spitting up cul-de-sacs,
	gaudying the ordered High Street with their pink
	trousers, yellow turbans and soot-tapered whiskers,
	unmodulating the idiom of their pandemonium dins...