There are days the goddess forgets
where she placed her earrings.
Not metaphorical stars.
Not moons hammered by celestial gold.
Small silver hoops
left beside the sink
while rushing to answer the door.
Someone is always arriving.
A cousin carrying mangoes wrapped in newspaper. A neighbor asking for cloves.
A child with a bleeding knee.
A friend who needs to laugh
until she forgets what sorrow is called. The goddess moves through the house barefoot.
Oil shimmering along her collarbones. Music low in another room.
A pot threatening to burn.
Outside,
men still write poems
trying to make her into weather,
trying to stretch her body large enough to hold prophecy,
nation,
warning,
desire.
Meanwhile
she is arguing with the fish seller
about prices.
Meanwhile
she is choosing tomatoes
with the concentration of a jeweler.
At dusk,
she sits on the roof
eating sliced guava with salt and pepper, watching laundry bend softly in the wind.
Below her,
the city continues its hunger.
Motorbikes coughing smoke.
Radios arguing through open windows. Somebody falling in love loudly.
The goddess laughs.
Not delicately.
She laughs
from the center of herself,
head thrown back,
full-throated and alive enough
to startle birds resting on telephone wires.
When night comes,
she oils her knees.
Answers no one.
Lets the world carry itself awhile.
Tomorrow they will ask for miracles again. She will offer nothing
except her living.
Tomorrow
she will wake late again,
wrap her scarf slightly crooked,
stop to taste fruit at the market,
as if holiness has always belonged to ordinary things.
AUTHOR BIO
Rashida James-Saadiya is a writer, visual artist, and cultural educator whose work explores identity, memory, migration, and collective liberation. Through poetry and storytelling, she examines how communities carry history, preserve memory, and imagine futures beyond rupture and survival. Her writing has appeared in Truthout, Prism, Sapelo Square, The Forge, and multiple anthologies including *Black Powerful: Black Voices Reimagine Revolution* and *A Kaleidoscope of Stories: Muslim Voices in Contemporary Poetry*. She is the Executive Director of the Muslim Power Building Project.
