Hannan Khan
Futures Like Foreplay
we were vowed hoverboards, sexless chromes & cities that sailed above consequences; instead, i poise in a field of sunflowers, their hefty heads craning not for luster but for the low purr of surveillance of drones — steel bees harvesting our longing; the planet beneath my feet is slick with undone dreams, soil still savouring of her — my granny’s voice, soaked with myth; used to anoint constellations with cognomen that throbbed like heartbeats; now the stars are strip-mined by satellites; glaciered with algorithms; choking on digital gasp; we sculpted futures like foreplay: fevered, unfinished, stuffed with what-ifs we never dared touch; there were nights we brushed space with our muted glossa — now we scroll endlessly; naked in the blue light; aching for the version of tomorrow we left unbreathed
……..skyline smudged with haze
……..dreams dissolve like chén xī dew
……..the clock strikes always
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Hannan Khan — a nefelibata, poet, and scholar of literature & linguistics from Pakistan. He combs through moments of love, death, delirium & relational complexities, seraphically tracing what’s breathed and what flickers unbreathed. His pen grooves between haibun & heartbreak, ghazals & ghost games, intimacy & apocalypse. When he craves reprieve, he devours dark thrillers like he’s dissecting crime scenes — psychological, raw, unpredictable. He thrives on distorting ordinary until it sings. Sips coffee, reads Manto & lets the world unravel. Featured in Failed Haiku, IHRAM Literary Magazine, SpecPoVerse & forthcoming in Graveside Press. Poetry is his altar; Fiction, his rebellion. He writes to unsettle, to unearth, to unlace.
{‘Nefelibata’ Portuguese for cloud walker: someone who lives in their own imagination and dreams}
Backstory & Author’s Comments: “Futures Like Foreplay,” a haibun, was originally written for another journal several months ago — where it didn’t ultimately land, perhaps because the poem itself hadn’t yet unearthed the future it was meant for. There was a time when I was overwhelmed by hyper-connectivity & haunted by the dissonance between futures we fantasized & the ones we now inhabit. It started as a free-write around the question: what did we once crave — & what did we settle into instead? That version lingered in drafts, seemed displaced for a while — until now, when it finally finds its haven in Abyss & Apex, where it belongs. This piece began as a meditation on the gap between our imagined tomorrows & algorithm-choked realities we’ve drifted into. There’s an echo embedded in the poem — part memory, part myth — that gestures back to a time when naming the zvezdani held more intimacy than mapping them with code. That core tension between sacred & synthetic, the sensual & the sterile, sculpted both mood & structure of the poem.
Editor’s Comments and Image Credit: According to an Internet search, Chén xī is a Chinese term that translates to “first rays of morning sun” or “first glimmer of dawn”. It refers to the light that appears at the very beginning of the morning.
Chén lù, on the other hand, means “morning dew”. This refers to the moisture that collects on surfaces during the morning hours.
Therefore, “chén xī dew” would translate to “morning dew at dawn” or “dew at the first glimmer of dawn.” This phrase could potentially be used to describe the dew that forms during the very early morning hours as the sun begins to rise.
While both terms relate to the morning, chén xī refers specifically to the light of the morning sun, while chén lù refers to the morning dew.
Haibun’s are popular these days (even Rattle has jumped on that bandwagon); this one is quite good!
Image Credit: The image was created with the input of “field of sunflowers craning upward at drones that resemble bees, the sky ominous with dreams” to an image generator (Wixel by Wix.com).