POEMS

Ode to Ellipsis, Aap Jaisa Koi, forthcoming, The Boiler, 2026

Butched Bared Baritone, Mosaic II, Valerian, forthcoming, Sinister Wisdom, SWANA Dykes Issue, 2026

Camila’s Incision, Poetry Northwest, 2026

So Sick, North American Review, 2025

I-11, Islamabad, LAKEER Mag, 2025

Organism, THE BRAWL// , //OF EMPHASIS, THE DRUM: Pushcart nominated, Hayden’s Ferry Review, 2025

Ramadan Reconciliations, RHINO, 2025

on hunger & What is the “rule of law”, Michigan Quarterly Review, 2025

Al-Eashiq, Wisconsin People’s & Ideas, 2024

Dead Sea Dance for Sodom, Poetry Daily, Aug 2024

It Ends Before It Begins, diode, July 2024

dreamland, Emerge Literary Journal, Nov 2023

Threading, Adroit, Oct 2023 (nominated for Best New Poets)

Wedding Season, Foglifter Volume 8 Issue 2, Oct 2023

Moon and Sea, Beloved Zine, Feb 2023

The Farmer and The Flood, Dead Sea Dance for Sodom, BAHR Magazine, Nov 2022

collecting words in attempt to keep them the same, The Offing, April 2022

From Lyric Lyre Lesbian Poetics: 

The high lyric is a poetic technology which allows for the collapsing of decipherable images and senses. It is a mode of navigating the in-between, not with clarity but with reign. The high lyric is surviving negligence. The high lyric is a reterritorialization of what is possible. Stanza translates to ‘room’. High lyric architectures grant permission to activate a high lyric life: a door to walk through, a home, a bedroom where a Beloved lays. Therefore, the high lyric allows for the impossible. The high lyric is non-exclusionary: allowing the voices of ghosts, angels, dreams, and spells to gain form and body. The high lyric is a tapestry of non-linear knots of space and time, fielding the possibility of individual interpretations for each lonely and unrepeatable “I”. The obscurity of the high lyric humanizes the obscurity of an apocalyptic world by making indecipherable violences capable of the facing. The State uses a silencing tactic of bombarding the senses; the high lyric rebukes this atrophy with a similar, fantastical real. The high lyric speaks to a tradition of history which relies on image over language: bridging linguistic, cultural, sensorial and spatio-temporal barriers across distances. The lyric is a tool I use to face my enemies and to articulate my comrades. The high lyric is how I make dreams a practice of the tangible. The high lyric is how I dream awake. 

PROSE

Lyric Lyre Lesbian Poetics, forthcoming, Butch-Femme Press

Beloved Counterpoetics: A Genealogy of Desire, ARCHIVE History Journal, June 2025

Notes on Hands, North American Review, 2025

Review for Late to The Search Party, Quarterly West, 2025

Syncopating Survival, NVP, UW Madison, December 2024

Review for Bluff, Adroit, September 2024

Diya Abbas is a first generation Butch Pakistani writer, performer, and playwright from the Midwest. She is currently a masters student at NYU’s Art and Public Policy program.