Hijab

my hijab is bright green box dye and platform boots

tall enough to crush a man’s skull

 

my hijab is lip gloss stained cloth

that (more than) once felt the tooth feathered puff of the word “fuck”

 

my hijab is an unfazed sixteen year old girl with a butterfly tattoo

drinking a screwdriver out of a recycled gallon of bleach

 

my hijab is an unopened limited edition Bjork vinyl

sitting on a bookcase that occasionally spits out its copy of The Satanic Verses

 

my hijab is a Buddhist monk making plans to have sex in that one big library

because they heard no one can hear you in the bookstacks

 

my hijab is the biker gang of eggs in my uterus

kicking away his sperm each time he doesn’t want to use a condom

 

my hijab is calling myself an uber when he asks me

if i can speak arabic while we’re doing

 

it my hijab is making up hypothetical situations

because my mom married a BULE so no one ever asks me: where is

 

my hijab? it’s in a little shoebox under my bed along with a bullet

vibrator and a cut out picture of harry styles

 

my hijab is telling everyone i love harry styles because i don’t

want everyone to know that i really love that girl

 

whose hijab is made of jasmine flowers and pink floyd album liner notes

i want to be kiss fuck ask that girl if she likes

 

my hijab when it gets a little wet from the rain

you could mistake the chiffon for a cat’s damp coat

 

my hijab is a small muslim girl shaking a snow globe

in the 9/11 memorial museum gift shop

 

my hijab is laughing because they doesn’t know the yes on 8

signs find homes in 276.3 California mosques

 

my hijab is the hair on my arms when my 8th grade english teacher

repeats the words “jihad”, “muslim” and “hijab”

 

my hijab is realizing my “like, like, like” probably would’ve sounded like

gunfire to her had i been wearing

 

my hijab which is honestly just like,

going through a really hard time right now

 

my hijab is saying wellllll technically the Quran doesn’t say anything about lesbians,

SO,

 

my hijab is bargaining, always bargaining

to keep itself on my head, even if it’s a little loose, even if it’s just

 

my hijab downvoting youtube comments

in corners of the internet darker than the crack in

 

my hijab, that liminal space in which i am in both states of medicated bipolar disorder

(texas and south dakota), that place of many secrets

 

one being that there is no secret behind

my hijab;

 

my hijab is my mother’s hijab

i stopped praying years ago

 

my hijab is pen scratch over the words assisted suicide

on the side of a cow that fasted itself to death

January Santoso is a singer-songwriter, producer, DJ, poet, and aspiring sapphic housewife.

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