FIZZA ABBAS

Chandi

my name means chandi: the silver,
the metal marketed as cheap gold.
for as long as I remember asking
my amma, why this name?
do you know who you are named for?
a princess of habesha¹, who left
her throne for the second imam.
the pride of us shia. imagine a woman
choosing service over a kingdom!
yeah mom, but a slave is a slave.
don’t fixate. she was an aalima²—
Koranic verses at the tip of her tongue,
quoting hadiths & ayahs to strangers.
she must have been an extrovert.
like your child was, until eight,
until the living room became a theater
& she an object of display.
didn’t you brag to the guests
about her memorizing the bones,
her physics & idiosyncratic english?
turned her to a trophy on the shelf
& never looked when she fumbled
why time & space are relative,
stared when she got confused
why doesn’t water fall off the globe?
your child was no princess,
just an average, shy kid bought
from an orphanage yard.
a lump of flesh & bone
cooing in a jhoola³ left outside
by a woman scared of her own blood.
you took me, an antidote
to your unhappy marriage,
an abandoned pot of heat steeped
in the smell of milk & powder.
you gave her a home & isolation
wide enough to explore her-
self down wikipedia rabbit holes,
learning the syntax of disorders.
you watched her obsession
with needles & irons & teeth:
playing with iron, pricking flesh,
mixing limestone with sulphuric acid
& tasting copper in her mouth,
smiling at herself in the mirror.
now friends call her names:
“fizzy drink”, “pan pizza”, “clumsy nutwanger”,
unable to speak the syllables right,
missing the stress on the double z.
the mandible moves, the teeth clench,
but the tongue refuses to rise
toward the alveolar ridge.
why did you make my name
a walking oddity suspended in air,
not going downward, failing
gravity.

Notes:

1. Historical Arabic and Urdu name for Abyssinia, which is modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea in East Africa
2. A learned woman, scholar, or expert, within Islamic jurisprudence, theology, and religious texts
3. Urdu word for cradle

Fizza Abbas is a journalist, poet, and author, with work appeared or are forthcoming in The Guardian, Oxford Review of Books, diode, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Writing NSW Micro-poetry Competition’26, Waterford Poetry Competition 2025 and Fahmidan Chapbook Contest’21, and a finalist for the Rough Diamond Poetry Contest 2026 and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition 2021. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net’21 and longlisted for the Propel Cambridge Poetry Prize 2026. She is the author of Bakho, Ool Jalool, and The Lament of Sunken Ships.