Aliyah Begum
The headscarf is no longer in the customisation menu so
I load the game long after my friends leave, increase sheep
with wheat, say Bismillah before sheep become meat,
play faith or make believe. Is my sincerity rendered hollow?
In Heaven, there is a tree where you can ride for a century
and still remain in its shade’s embrace. Here, our infinite
world takes 62 days to cross. I prostrate in 8-bit,
punch trees and replant them, exploit landscapes in binary,
till the sunset, bringing pixelated tears to eyes soon
to be square. I must share 2.5% of all I own so, here —
take this gold, make an axe of the crescent moon.
It takes a sharp edge to cut a cube from a sphere.
Aliyah Begum is a Birmingham-based writer and poet. She was chosen as a Young Critic for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022 by the Poetry Society, and her work has since appeared in Poetry London. She was Birmingham’s Young Poet Laureate between 2018-2020 and she is currently studying English at Oxford.
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