Zain Rishi
on bonfire night you would never catch us
down petersfield road with the rest of hall green
burning that wooden man / we had better ideas
or perhaps just smaller ones like holding
sparklers up to our faces as the sky
found a rhythm between the clatter and glow / it’s funny
how allah always finds us / we knew this when izza
came home that night her headlights beaming
lanky shadows down the drive her hands cupping
this ornament of a thing a bird yes a bird
a pigeon to be precise / its leg had been chewed
to a stump its eyes squinting like the boys
on the bus saying oi where i know you from / we asked it
that very question its head cocking to one side
not seeing but somehow believing that we
in our white house of brown faces
had something maybe kindness maybe mercy
for broken things / so we taped together
the old microwave box removed our shoes
from the hallway and made a bed with the leftover meadow
hay the rabbits had nuzzled in and died
last winter / the sky crackled as we stirred
our bismillahs but the bird didn’t budge it twitched
its leg its only leg its neon yellow anklet saying I am
a convict I am a prophet I am something
sent / the truth as ever was in faith / so we prayed
as if it was ramadan and in the morning
when it died and the cardboard was streaked
with its shit and the chaat was flung out for all the living
we carried it
to the garden and buried it by the rabbits
where it slept and not a sound
could bother it / not even the fire we threw at heaven
hoping something would come down.
Zain Rishi is a writer and bookseller from Birmingham. He won the 27th Annual Ware Poets Competition and third prize in the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize. His debut pamphlet, Noon, is forthcoming with The Emma Press in February 2026.
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