PUBLISHED: September 8, 2020
—with lines from Louise Glück’s “Mock Orange”
reeking of moss & blossom & on the street
i call home, i cannot be sure if i
exist. my thighs press on one another
& it is something of reminder—here are shorts
and a sheer top—& i pass a minivan, no color
in particular, its doors and trunk
open, interior filled with funerary
bouquets, satin ribbons spilling
out the back, white & red & yellow bulbs & so
many stems. i’m thinking about support,
what makes me possible here, next
to the colonnades, the mourning
filing unceremoniously out to smoke
on the front steps in dresses i think
to myself are too short for lament— & then look
at my inner oppressor
again. thirteen months since we scattered
Dadaji’s ashes. i’m reminded : no ceremony
does justice. i walk on & keep
grieving everything i see,
there & here.
+
preparing for some Q&A i face
myself frontal, hair in curlers
& vegetable oil, the way
i was taught, Ma’s fingers kneading
my supple dough, thin
skin, silly skull. only so many poems
come each year. women, i feel
a pressing, & yet some days— . here’s
what happens when i shirk your pain.
i wrestle each clip from its clamp
& hold. the curls
fall away & i’m on camera,
limp. i’m sitting next to myself.
she speaks for me. i hate her
as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth / sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—
+
i use the wrong spelling of the American
word because, yeah, i guess technically
i’ve been owned by the English? my love retorts
meaning nothing of it : “didn’t you grow up here?”yes,
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves. yes, i am an unleashed
flock of hummingbirds. i’m nothing
if not your language
& how i adhere to it without asking
any questions, any questions at all.
+
mortuaries & i sit nestled behind
thick curtains, air conditioner blaring
my privilege like a siren.
ran from a man across the street again
tonight, followed other immigrants’ names
home—Gangemi, Baldi, Grasso.
he tracked my weaving through a maze
of parked cars, called me “snack,” then
“cunt.” i live in the Empire
& peace is illusion
everywhere.
+
alone online, i hunt for more
motherland. am starved
for belonging. will never
belong. Ma would say : “wherever you are,
you’re home.”i find a video of men
in Kerala palming short glass
cups of tea. their fingers claw
the edges, flip upside down & back
& the milk sifts like a drunk cloud
into chai & cardamom pods swirl
to the surface despite the inverted
tornado. skinny brown things
with star-shaped crowns, bobbing
in the white. i’m tired, don’t transcribe
the metaphor.
+
of the role of silence in this world
i want to write something like :who violences
us, who palms our tender
skulls & plucks us
from the silver tray.
here i am trying
to hold on to my head.
How can I rest?
+
i summon the version of your
masc-love, that does not
exoticize or point out, yeah,
my onstage persona
is really Indian, almost as if
i myself am Indian. “that’s why
i want my nose pierced,” i’d said
to my mother at sixteen—stoned
on the good high of not eating
& disappearing white, Ma in the hospital
riddled with malaria—“i want to feel
connected.”
