Entangled-touch
A Ghazal
A wind from our dead bloomed suddenly between us— its hush wove centuries into entangled-touch. A river reopened its wound as we spoke— its flooded banks held us in entangled-touch. Exile heard its ruin break in our voices— even unbelonging had its entangled-touch. They called it attachment disorder in therapy— but language can’t untangle entangled-touch. Your sorrow unshaped me—monsoon into clay— no boundary withstood that entangled-touch. The room darkened, unsure which one to keep— its last light flickered into entangled-touch. I wrote your name wrong—then scratched it out. Even the silence flinched with entangled-touch. Memory bloomed—like rot beneath the skin— it festered open with entangled-touch. My body unlearns its shape beneath the sky— I am the bloom and rot inside entangled-touch.
Lineage note
This ghazal continues my meditation on forms of touch that can’t be cleanly exchanged, returned, or understood. In earlier poems, I explored Self-Touch—where intimacy folds inward when the world can’t receive it—and Returned-Touch, where intimacy goes outward and floods its shores, circulating through the body long after the moment of contact has passed.
But Entangled-Touch moves differently. Here, touch arrives unbidden: through weather, memory, exile, and history. It doesn’t happen between individuals. It happens in the field—the atmosphere, the room, the language, the wound. It’s overwhelming, shared, and often not chosen. I wanted to see what happens when “touch” becomes not just an act, but a condition. A thing we live inside.
Western ideas of attachment, consent, or even identity struggle in this terrain. Here, nothing is simple or singular. Harm and care, bloom and rot, inheritance and breakage—everything exists at once, without neat lines or clean resolutions. Writing this ghazal was a way of listening to that complexity—not solving it, just letting it speak.
What remains isn’t a story. It’s a weather system. Still moving. Still touching.