in my head this afternoon it rained
by Jasmine Khaliq
I wrote this poem in 2020, in California, in autumn, after rain. Late afternoon into evening. I really felt there were a lot of things pooling in my mind. So much time spent inside.
I was thinking about everything I did and didn’t know about love at that point in my life. This is the sort of poem I could only get to writing for Somewhere Horses by first writing most of the others. For the first couple of years writing that book, I always drafted in very large blank-page notebooks in landscape/horizontal orientation. I used different notebooks by the time of this poem (I love to force change this way), but as I wrote, I felt I needed the same sort of space for silence and breath and thought that those big notebooks encouraged, and I made some. I’m grateful to SIR for printing this poem in a way that preserves all its space. I hope others find space for their own thoughts inside of it. Still when I read this poem I also feel grateful to have been born in April, for my parents, and for the beauty and responsibility of my particular and mortal life. And, of course, for horses.
Jasmine Khaliq is the author of Somewhere Horses, winner of the Barrow Street Press Editors’ Prize, forthcoming April 2027. Her poetry is found in 32 Poems, Passages North, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University and an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. Currently, Khaliq is a PhD candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Utah.