Publication Info: Blue Minaret Literary Magazine | October 2025
Description:
This poem documents my Friday commute to Jumu'ah prayer through Queens, New York, exploring how urban Muslim life transforms public transit into sacred space. The Q40 bus route becomes a spiritual pathway, where everyday journeys become acts of worship and city streets map the geography of faith.
Poetry collection in development exploring urban spirituality, family legacy, personal transformation, and community belonging through the lens of a Queens poet navigating faith and creative expression.
Publication Info: The Scene Life Magazine | Issue #29, February 2026
Published in an open mic magazine documenting the pulse of poetry across NYC, Long Island, and beyond. Issue theme: Divine Joy.
This issue is currently sold out.
Forged at the Plumbum x BXWriters Workshop — "Sonia Sanchez : Loved and Free" facilitated by Sol Emiliano & Evolution
Extracted
I wasn't assembled. I was extracted.
Pulled from the pressure, the people,
the practice,
the block where the doctrine got drafted
in factions,
where the losses were tuition.
So I came out the kiln with the fire still active.
That's not a bar. That's a manufacturing
caption.
Sonia wrote in the basement...Definitive.
Baraka wrote in the rage....Definitive.
Hathaway played from inside the devotion,
not for the stage, not for the page,
but from inside the cage of his own nafs
breaking open at a particular age.
That's the standard. That's the wage.
The city writers turned the burning into oracle,
the mourning into protocol.
They didn't write for the optional.
They wrote because survival was the document.
I was that kid.
Different block, same 2am, same not knowing.
The legacy isn't marble.
It's the line still living in the chest
of the kid from Hoboken at 2am
who didn't know the tradition had a lane for him.
A wise person once asked "how many lines can this n###a here run ?"
We know now...