Vulnerable
adjective

1. capable of being easily hurt or harmed physically, mentally, or emotionally

2. open to attack, harm, or damage

Vulnerable comes from the Latin noun vulnus, meaning “wound”.

The vulnerability of transness has, for me, felt synonymous with the vulnerability that arrives stapled to the artist’s life. Each commits to the continuity of articulation—a repetition of change, and a faith in the call for that repetition’s translation so that it may be expressed. Like dancers writing with feet and air, and fingers squeezing four strings into a lasting chord, like the painter pulling sunlight from the sky and two hands curled around needle and thread, so too is trans life devoted to experiencing our inner expanses in their embodied forms.

As poets, we know our language has been hijacked by perpetrators of inertia who want us unmoved. So we come to understand that speech must be turned into song. To do so, the body must make a new decision to twist the voice into its next shape. So too, the scalpel gliding against skin, a barber’s clippers kissing the nape of neck (next the wind), a shade of lipstick, a winged eye, a deep breath, a syringe pushed, then pulled, a drop of blood—anything which can be drawn, by which I mean brought in, and at once, also, brought about. I pull the feeling down and the word comes out. I sense the direction of my body change, and I change the direction of my body. Each articulation of who we are is also an articulation of who we will no longer be. Rather than the rehearsed public arrival, this life of a continuous, public attempt. Vulnerable. Wounded. The mirror open and the curtains drawn.

Six months have passed, and I keep coming back to the image of the curtains resting by Rheame’s window in the days following surgery. Pain billowing behind the sound of lives passing by below. Weeks before, I had watched from the same pillowed perch, Rheame’s friend sleeping on the couch shirtless, their scars well-healed and visible only as a blurred glimpse from each side, their stomach and chest pressed flat against the makeshift bed. Weeks later, in the ripeness of becoming, in those pain-shafted hours when all I could do was ask, I thought of that friend, and I failed to imagine being able to someday sleep with my chest pressed that way —flat and against— without the sutures screaming into snaps, without the drains filling with puss, without wire slicing into the skin where it was tied, sending a rippling red screeching through my breath. I couldn’t, from that height of injury, climb down to imagine my body healed.

It is this journey—following truth into injury, following injury into faith—that I call vulnerability. When I am writing (like so), I am opening the language of my life, so that I may sit inside it. When I am sharing my work, I am bringing to you, dear reader, the form and music I made of that language. It feels no different than walking into my family home quivering, my hair no longer falling to my shoulders behind me; no different than letting my lover unbutton my shirt and put her mouth to the newformed scar not knowing what I will next feel. I enter with the body I have chosen and I offer it. The poem on the page is in the shape I made it. It is vulnerable because it is honest about its own temporality. Here is a moment in time. Here is the next, entirely new. To honor it, I will allow myself to be drawn.

Thank you for reading!

This month, two new poems published in the latest issue of POETRY magazine. A bright sentence, given the light by which I’ve written, the light that shares that page. The two poems are from a series that runs through HUMہم , a big stitch in the book’s braid. One of them, more giving with its language than I’ve been before—what Taylor might call looking the poem in the eye.

I’ve been feeling more steadily into the thought of shame, how a single word can carry the power to wield me inside it. I know, on one level, that it isn’t the gathering of letters holding me there, but the meaningmeaningmeaning which has been layered—meticulous and enchanting—in sheets of snow against the word, which, when I write in a poem is one thing, but when I read from the eye’s of another, like someone sitting in the windowseat of the arriving train watches you look at your own reflection in the tinted glass, their face translucent and set inside your face, their looking framed upon your looking, and the whole thing feeling naked now, a single strand of hair in the bathroom sink; it is then that shame, or what I’ve come to call shame, rides with its talons curled around my shoulder, its wings folded down and bobbing as I, ashamed, turn and walk away from all of it—the window, the looking, the snow falling silently behind it.

Truth is topless in the early hours of morning is how the second line goes. Isn’t there something naked about the dawn, something private-colored there? A stich of Sunday traffic slips through the bedroom window, churchsong laced just behind it. Rheame is still asleep, and Mimi, paws on her eyes, is curled asleep against her, bellies soft and the soft of dreams rising to touch the sounds of passing cars. I am topless too, and thinking about the week after surgery, the days whose memory comes like that passing sound, pain making the light swim in early morning dew, and the sound gone by the time you reach the window to look outside. When I say the word trans, I’m talking about a kind of time that moves, much like a train, in many parts; the headlights touching my future, and the horn sounding from my past.

Both these poems travel that railway to reach you. You can read the first one here and the second one here, and with each you can press the little red icon to hear my voice reading it alongside you. I’ll also post the photos below for easy reading.

Of all the ways to move and be moved, body and breath have been my favourite. Thank you to those who travel with me, and to your soft looking, from which I need not avert my gaze.

With Love,
Sanam

Today’s win, 15 years later, is a sound that travels its bright path through a sky that joins me to the high school kid I once was, believing so hard in beauty.

Sitting in this new thought, this first book thought—sunlight on the sound of a page turning—I return to the lines of Agha Shahid Ali:

The world is full of paper. I am sitting with the beautiful questions of how best to wrap these poems for your hands. I am so thrilled to say my debut poetry collection, HUMہم won the Backwaters Prize in Poetry and will be published with the University of Nebraska Press in October, 2026. The contest was Judged by Maggie Smith, a poet I have revered for as long as I’ve known her work. These are her kind words:

“Daring, inventive, and deeply human, HUMہم helped restore my faith in what imagination and language can do, even as those in power work to corrode both. This is a book I needed to read by a poet I feel fortunate to be living alongside.”

The word hum in Urdu, can mean both ‘we’ and ‘I’. In English, a gesture of sound. I sit down to write and stand up to speak from the voice of the many people I have been, and from our collective sense of I.

Sitting at my childhood desk, that I could translate my pain into beauty meant I was no longer alone—I was with myself. Now, that the beauty of the line could translate someone else’s pain means I am no longer alone—I am among. It is that amongness (a word I first learnt from Taylor Johnson) with which I lean on the word hum, with which I sit down to write and stand up to speak.

Today, I turn in my first complete draft of my manuscript to the editors at the University of Nebraska Press, exactly one year ahead of the book’s release. Given that HUMہم is my debut poetry collection, the business of publishing and launching a book feels obscure, unknown, daunting. As the next several months unfold, I’m going to try to share that journey on here in the hopes of making the process more transparent, and of being accompanied through the dark of it. It is my understanding that books written are prayers spoken. Books that reach their readers are prayers answered.

Thank you for being here. I hope you will journey with me down the roads that follow.

Here’s the full announcement from the press.

Until Soon—

I would spend the next couple months sitting in that same room, in that same spot, pouring over The Lucky Ones—Zara’s debut memoir—a book first named to me by Divya Victor as essential, “a way to continue your good thinking about daughters, men and violence, and the Muslim/Hindu dynamic in India at present…a book forged in fire.” So, I took for granted, before turning those first few pages, that I was about to strum and be strummed by resonant chords, history, and language for the complexity it holds, a political and familial meandering rooted in the country I come from and the questions we ask of it.

But most eagerly, I knew that by reading this book, I would get to spend time in the mind and world of a human I had just encountered; a human who had dropped into my American life for one night and half a morning, only to leave behind the feeling of home as a person—not in its sentimental sense, but in its embodied self—Zara did not apologize for being at home in my home, we laughed in a way I can only assemble from Urdu, and when we spoke, a bridge that I have kept erect in my mouth for all these years came peeling down, and she joined me there—without translation, in the things I said—at the very place from which they came to be meant.

Then, once she was gone, I spent the weekend walking inside a particular kind of weather. It felt heavy, yet expectant—pregnant and faithful in that way—but tinged with a kind of sadness a child might have in the wake of what has been taken away. I have come to understand that weather as the inception point at which the loss of what could have been encounters the hope of what has now been made possible. For those brief, late September hours in Philadelphia, I was companioned by how it could feel to live in the company of those who not only speak your language of asking, but are fluent in your suitcase of memory.

And then, just as quickly, I was alone in my sunroom with the English I had gathered over all these years and the distance I had raised inside me like a tall field of flowers I cannot name and fail to do so simply because of that distance. Zara had walked between their stems, and I found that it was no longer a field, but a blanket we shared at Washington Square Park where the grass held its green as we spoke to each other for the first time, asking questions of where and from whom. A man by the fountain behind us (unimportant yet indispensable) pressed his fingers to the keys of a piano we could not see, and what we could not see floated the air to gift us the understanding of everything—time, space, estrangement—being collapsible by music. I understood then, in an open-mouthed moment of laughter, that kinship is not a question of commonality, but a chord, which, when sounded in another, eliminates the idea of silence. What you touch hums with your touch. In that vibration, you are moved.

What moved inside me in the months that followed as I sat in the sunroom with Zara's book in my hands and its pages slowly turning was a deliverance of awe. I was encountering, as if for the first time, the alchemy of otherwise unassuming small and simple shapes—lines, curves, and dots—brought into choreography with the black of ink and the blank of page. And from these small shapes came letters, and from these small letters arranged meticulously beside each other, came a slow and marvelous reconstruction of the home I grew up in: the darkening quiet that roamed its corridors, the brittle angers that held its sway, the shayari and romance perfuming its air, the inheritance that divided and multiplied its shame, the suspended afternoon light that furnished its walls, and the people—my parents and their parents before them—who had been born into a country that hung outside those windows and smuggled, sentence by sentence, its history in.

I believe one of the primary projects of art is the enactment of an immediate love; love that does not require a long passage of time, a deep courtship of knowing. When we encounter a painting or a poem or a melody or a sculpture, when we allow it to open and inhabit our imagination, we are agreeing to enter an architecture of love that leans on trust, wonder, and discovery to fulfill its endeavor of change. I come to what has been made so that I can be made different, and in this coming to is a kind of surrender, which I have come to frame as that immediacy and totality with which we might allow ourselves to love who and what we don't yet know, but know enough to say Yes, I am your witness as you translate the word of your God, which at its most distilled, is the word of your living, your love, and your loss.

This is the kind of love I felt upon meeting Zara and felt again and again as I made my way through The Lucky Ones. This is not a book review. What happens in those pages is something you ought to find out for yourself, but what happened to me in those pages is what I am here to tell about. Chapter after chapter, I found that I was at the nexus of being taught, being reflected, being received, and being pulled—not from my lived world into another's recounted one—but invited deeper into my own world so that within it I could find the world Zara has named as hers. I was given, in this way, a mirror as portal, and portal as pondwater that I may reach my hand into so that what once was my reflection's face was now the faces of clouds that I could turn to Zara and ask, without speaking, about their shape.

If you look back and through the first floor corridor of Chalet Apartments, you will see that I did not grow up taking an elevator to the flat I lived in with my father and brother. Yet, in these pages, as Zara traveled up and down her building’s elevator, the infrastructure of my own childhood began to shift to fit it, so that I too could open, then close the grilled metal doors and press the number 8, so that the neighbours and friends she names could wear the faces of the people my life has vined itself around. Now take this small instance of alchemy and stretch it to the size of a country and the depth of its history. Weigh it against the entry wound where one first learns the distinction between us and them. Hold it to the light of what cannot be understood by outline, that shoreline where love and pain come to spit salt and sand towards each other until you cannot tell one's border from one's body, and the work of the granular is also at once the size of the stars. Such is the breadth and light of Zara's work.

In an essay titled "Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy", T Kira Madden writes "I want the magician’s thread to hit the light and for it to make you appreciate the flying card even more. What skill and choreography it takes to spin the card without breaking thread, without a tangle. What skill to make us care." To me, the magic of The Lucky Ones is that it does not try to conceal the work of that thread. It is a memoir that reveals, page after page, the labor of its stitching, the delight of its poetry, the cost of its truth-telling, the urgency of its asking, the dignity of its allegiance to dignity, and the tenderness of its remembrance (tender like a bruise is tender, like a lover's hand in yours). Zara threads us through Urdu and English, Muslims and Hindus, north and south, love and abuse, violence and its victims, before and after, without ever flinching in her steadfast rejection of a binary. In this book, we are in the hands of a voice that believes a line is not a border. It is the latticework of what holds us here. It is the line on which she writes.

I am writing this last paragraph from that same spot in my sunroom. I am alone and accompanied. I am painfully and blissfully changed. I am thankful for the line of people that brought me to this moment. Almost half a year ago in New York City, Divya Victor sat across from me in near-perfect dappled light and quoted Gaston Bachelard—"The grace of a curve is an invitation to remain." What you touch hums with your touch. The line moves into a curve. Zara's words populate the space her absence makes. The only distance is return.

I am writing to share with you two new poems that were published in the latest issue of The Adroit Journal. It is humbling to be among the lineage of so many poets I have learnt from, but regardless of who or how big the publisher is, it is always a beautiful, momentous feeling to know that the poems have been released, and that now, they might move quietly through the world and reach somebody deep enough to move them, to accompany them, to change them. It is like leaving a post it on a bus stop to make a stranger smile, hoping they will pass it on, but knowing it is enough just to have left it there. I have been thinking a lot about the role of the artist/poet in a time like this—a time of televised genocide, video-looped brutality, and lies backed by an entire empire. Sometimes, words on a page feel like such a futile gesture. Then, a student sends along a poem that is just one sentence long, written by Sean Thomas Dougherty, titled Why Bother? “Because right now, there is someone out there with a wound in the exact shape of your words.”

I hope that these poems might take the shape you are in search of; that if you are moving through grief, they might remind you of the love at its source. As always, if you feel moved to reach back, I would love to hear from you.

Here they are:

https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-forty-seven/sanam-sheriff/

Thank you for you.

With Faith,
Sanam

Walking down the Tuesday market where the Pakistani boys at the breadstall used to call me back for the attention of a woman and the familiarity of home. Laughing with them in Urdu, drinking chai. Eating the zucchini tzatziki remembering when I called Naomi from that tented heat because in those days I had to fight to know what to eat. Kindness of the man behind the café who let me use the bathroom this morning. Girl with her eyebrows dyed holding my hand, meeting my gaze, and saying this was healing. Rasha on the balcony in Arabic, how sounds to me are words to her and mean needing to leave. Wanting so badly to accompany her through. Barista from the photo texting a wrecklessness, Tempelhofer with Pruthu, stepping back into such a specific thenself with the feet of a hereself. So young and spinning like the spokes of my yellow bicycle. Meghna at the café by the cemetery. That feeling of meeting someone you already know for the first time. The kinship immediate, her consideration gentle but critical, her drawing out a map of possible. Reading Virginia and Vita’s letters and believing again in the power longing can bring, not weakness as distance does to me. Rheame still right there when I close my eyes at night and open them in late morning, light from the windows all over the air mattress, Rasha tip-toeing around me half asleep. Coffee and a cigarette in her hands before a word from her mouth. So many selves we’ve been through, and now, affection where desire once was—steady and with longevity.

Pata by the canal smoking a cigarette and closing their eyes to tell me their memories. Pata at the café bench giving me their jacket, speaking in Lithuanian, meeting my gaze with a smile, hand on my knee. Lor loving in Arabic and needing no translation. Asia at the bookshop twirling me into her storm, gift wrapping the books, holding my waist. Grey in the sky, on the sidewalk, in the streets. Memory still colouring my mind. There is a difficulty and ease here simultaneously. Foreignness is familiar, but different than amerikkka—the openness of strangers, the sprawling public space, the pulse of art. Woman in a hijab driving a convertible with the top down blasting Gasolina. Bangladeshi behind the counter speaking to me in Hindi, saying stay here and make money, the papers will come. Caris riding in the rain in front of me, standing on stage at the open mic, saying blessing saying thank you, saying love. Anu and Ley on top of each other at the lake, speaking of trust, stopping to flip over the insect so it can keep going, keep living its insect life. My fear around couplehood snagging and slipping at the same time. I want mirrored solitudes, to protect my giving to I. The last train pulls out of the station without me and my phone is dead and my friends are gone. It’s 2AM, raining, and far from home. So much depends on the kindness of strangers, the kindness of self. 

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Trust me, you are beautiful even when you are alone, and you cannot see It. Trust me, you can dance. Trust me, you will laugh one day after move your body under the rain, feeling free.…

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