The Brooklyn Rail

She who saw all things in the broad-boned earth and beyond, 
and knew what was to be known
She who had seen what there was, and had embraced the ‘otherness’
She to whom the image clung like a mirror; a display of crisis
and who dwelt together with a devised becoming
She knows and sees the unknown and lays them bare
She is the ‘monstrous other’, the dark goddess, the possessive jinn, 
the dividing persona, the alternative figure 
She restores myths and histories; the untold and the forgotten; the misread and uneven;
Those of and from the Near East
She is an inventor and a destroyer. She prescribes and rejects.
In her city, there was no ‘outside’, yet doors remained open and unlocked

Her name is Huma. 
She who is of flame and blaze
She is a Jinn made of smokeless and scorching fire
Among a race created by Allah prior to humans
From the very day of her birth
She was responsible for common fever; ‘The fever of fevers’ as they called it.
The heat she brings to the human body is a symptom of an underlying condition
Not a condition itself
Out into the world
She comes to possess Earth and humans alike.          

In the whole universe, there was none better, none whom she, Huma, could not best.
She leads all the burnings
Looking up from the sun
She is a demon with three heads
two identical, vaguely equine 
one looking right and the other left. 
Leveled within an infinite horizon to see the disaster above her   
The third head faces forward. Above the other two, looking into the future
Her open legs with bent knees and open arms 
Surpassing all creatures
Great in respect, a monster in her form
She is the site of the warm globe and the slowly burning human

Her three talismans are encountered frequently
One to simply summon and invoke her
To call and conjure her 
Chanting her name seven times in a row
She enters from the most unforeseen openings 
She bubbles up and out of the deep dark bowels of the Earth
Forcing the heat of the desert to all she will possess
In favor of the rotting and heated bodies, airs, rocks, and oceans 

Her second Talisman is to both bring and treat the fevered ‘skin’ 
One no one could elude
One she is the most worshiped for
She then extends her body to make all temperatures equal; 
Above ‘the normal’ on all surfaces.
For the Dehydrated  and The un-suffered from drought.
 
To rise and drop the existing catastrophe 
in all directions—from North to South and East to West
She looks into a reflection—giving a second self to her
One half, cracking
The other, nourishing the hosts 
“To colonize the colonizers, to occupy the occupiers; of this body and these lands”. She communicates with the diseased
She is a monster and should be.

Her third Talisman; one she is the most feared for; 
One that will collapse all ‘actuals’, is the Infectious Madness
Rooted from the incurable heat, leading into chronic hallucinations
Causing irritability; 
Causing convulsions; 
Causing sea level sweat.
All men gone mad by Huma, and no son was left sane to his father.
And the gods cried out from this image; the return of the repressed; the underprivileged. 
She, Huma, who shatters the unjust subject      
To expose symptoms:
Causing delirium
Causing Alienation
Causing horizontal difference
Causing universal blurring
Causing immediate cruelty of nature
All to give birth to a parallel world between the ill and the healthy flesh