News at Eleven: To turn a woman's face into a private organ

is to violently fetishise the body and forcibly throw it into two divided realms: one, of public obscurity, and two, of private consumption. As if her face is a gazing beehive of hazardous intentions, which has to be debarred from exuding the slippery honey of temptations. Naheed cuts through the crumbling logic of this paranoid prohibition in Anticlockwise. In the poem she avows the multiple erotic spheres of a woman's desire, which also mark her freedom:

Even if my eyes become the soles of
your feet
Even so, the fear will not leave you
That though I cannot see
I can feel bodies and sentences
Like a fragrance

from Hard News: 'Can poetry describe this?'

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