reflection on Jai Hamid Bashir’s ‘Desire/Halves’ from Nine Syllables Press (2024)

Desire/Halves
Jai Hamid Bashir
Nine Syllables Press 2024

Carried into recognition by an insufficient believing, I want to sound like I have held things. As for the sound itself, I can’t tell you how to hear. I think Jai Hamid Bashir’s ‘Desire/Halves’ might be a place maps listen to. With mouth as a memory center, Bashir’s verse makes its bones beneath silent orchards reddened by the respoken language of woozy flashlights. The mirror we’re looking at isn’t there and its snapshot memory is a bluesick reminder that despair is a string tied around the bruised finger of one who kneels in the dream just as an eyeball begins to sink through the moon. As such, when reading this work, we are near the body that exhumes image and not far from the brightly bored forms bathed in the local. Leave your eyes where they are. Unplug your angel’s lover into the gaslit déjà vu of touch. I will hold my belonging and I will lose it to this work, this half, gasping after the lyrical apostasies of its long hosanna.

~
reflection by Barton Smock