Always Remember To Forget Me

You will trust your first words to my trees, take
With you just their echoes, time-dust ground fine
Enough to vanish. You will love this bleak
Winter, but break its cocoon. You will earn
Your gilded wings through myriad oozing shames.
You will name your first child for a lost lake,
Your second after a mountain of mine;
But your third in a tongue you do not speak,
   In a language of exile. You will learn
To forget: places, animals, things; then names.

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Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Pleiades, Miracle Monocle, Glassworks, Windsor Review, Moria, CommuterLit, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez Twitter X: @hibahshabkhez Insta: @shabkhez_hibah