Faisal Mohyuddin​
​

We Choose Our Own Miseries

From our mouths emerge
blasts of winter, its white fires

held within the savage
eyes of owls in the hollowest

hours of piety. Distilled
prayer. No one thirsty. Who

else speaks so brazenly
of wilting crowns, the dead

of a city split in two and starved
of memory? Carrying upon

its strained shoulders, the cure
for remembering the gold

sighs of daylight, for a horse
frozen in a field of ghost

flowers, for a summoned
quiet descending. A child’s song

says more about misery,
about the thundering depravity

of these hymns trapped in bone
than the locket slung across

a wonder-heavy heart.
The shovel’s head. A flaunt

of seedlings. An anchoring
wish in each hush of saltwater.
​
The palace gates. The bright
mirror into which we sink.

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Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (Next Page Press, 2024), The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, and The Riddle of Longing. He teaches English at Highland Park High School in suburban Chicago and creative writing at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies; he also serves as a Master Practitioner with the global not-for-profit Narrative 4 and is a visual artist.