tonight, alone, in the queens apartment,
you watch light unspool from street lamps, curl under chins 
like a noose. watch a fly limp up the windowsill, 
wonder if this is how adults are born: 
trembling on the floorboards, curled up under 
page six of the new york times. body bowed in reverence to 
gods on neon billboards and yellowlight skylines. jim bakker is
on tonight and he tells you that god loves you: he really does! 
but he can’t see the utility bills piling up like a 
lifetime of sin by the door, can’t see the shadow 
of your breath shuddering hollow on the dust, and it is
still tonight, and you are still alone. 
what would your parents say if they could see you? 
your mother says she is always proud, but for you the derivative of 
hurt will always be her face at the lucknow airport when you 
stepped on the tarmac, her cheeks burnished with the afterimage of steam from
pots of ginger tea and lovely evening chatter.
would she still be proud if she knew how you burn the edge of 
every star-spangled dream with nag champa incense? 
how you still sing lullabies from the old country when you find 
the darkness inconsolable? how you spit 
english words into hot pans like raai, let them 
splatter oil onto the kitchen curtains? even the birds here
sing differently. you haunt sidewalks like a
mirage, watch people slip in and out the labyrinth of 
orange light and smog. punch crowds in corner delis,  
wonder if this is how bodies forget their birthplace: 
sitting at the noodle shop on 38th avenue and decoding
langston hughes. tasting beer for the first time, throat singing, 
wonder if this is how bodies forget the difference:
between a leaky trailerpark faucet and the summer monsoons that 
flooded their girlhoods like a new wound. between the
hiss of plastic toaster and the mangoes that 
crack into hot indian suns. between times square 
preachers, howling gospel through cracked windows, and the
seven sharpened tongues hiding in your mother’s recipe book—
praying. when will you learn to love this country? you lie:
awake, feel the foreign names furl in your mouth like a
receipt. feel their corpses in the chill of
the air: emma. lincoln. martin. 
wonder if tonight will be a renaissance or a funeral. 
and you cannot fall asleep. and tonight you will discover all the ways a body 
rewrites its history. you trace ribs into subway rails. feel the imprint 
where they caved into your belly, an avalanche of 
sandwich crusts and chalky pills. wring lungs into greasy 
coupon chiaroscuro, electrify blood vessels as powerline grids. 
unhook hindi from the curl of your tongue. crack bone into 
new york hustle, suck the marrow until memory of ash
disappears into every city rooftop, 
dusts every tenement dawn. 


Cutglass
Originally published in the Kenyon Review

Mama tells me there are men who measure themselves by the
shadows they cast. In the war years they ripped softness from 

the earth like bread and held it in their teeth. I was not 
to be baptized in the blackened throat of a rifle. This is how

to leave home: in the underbelly of a truck with three teeth
bared and passport shredded under tongue. Well, I suppose 

it is a story well known. Boats break upon banks and 
suture bodies onto the shore. We are so tired of anthems

and children’s things. I am trying to weep for the 
rubber factory and the boy I kissed behind it, trying to

remember what it felt like to deliver my baby sister in the bedroom
beside the mango grove. What it felt like to bear the weight of another 

heart: Cavernous, like thumbing through a photo album of the dead 
grandmother you never listened to. Oh Mama, memory will always

load the gun, and morning will find us scattered into lace. 
There are men who excavate graveyards from white skies and hold their

children as they would a gun. We will take this new country and wear it like
a coat. 

1991
My father in the picture is not
someone I can name, untouched by time he 
steams in his own glory. Cocooned in oyster’s pearl and
smile cracking his oil dark skin, my father in the picture is the
kind of man to eat unwashed fruit directly from
the ground, the kind of man to throw a lit firecracker into the open 
window of his neighbor. Dangerous, he says, I was 
dangerous, dangerous, I ask, this thick haired, fish eyed boy?
Yes, my father in the picture says. Dangerous the way
young men with no bodies to surrender are, the way men
who keep their life’s savings in glass jars and call their
mothers everyday are. Dangerous the way men who 
fantasize about running away from home with nothing but a
 rifle and a book are, what good are water or a compass, my father
 asks, if I already have what I need to survive?  Each year 
behind him blowing like bed linens in the hot Indian wind, so 
utterly important. Even from here I can see it in his eyes. 
The camera pins him down and I dissect him like it’s 
biology class, put a scalpel to his skull and peel: blood curdling on
his face like a lineage haunted by God's outstretched fingers. 
I can hear the heady riots frothing in his veins, touch the 
spine curved: two hands cupped together, ready to
scavenge for the rain and its milky halo, for the red Delhi moon 
rippling like a lilypad, for anything at all. 
My father in the picture is still so young, he has not yet 
learnt how beautiful he is. He does not know 
he is beautiful the way all young men are beautiful: the glint 
of light on the edge of a blade. A prayer forged from blackened steel,
ready for the unbecoming.  Neruda
“Those who know of Pablo Neruda, know him as the Chilean Nobel Prize winner poet who became a symbol of resistance for the people of Latin America. 

What people should know before idolizing him is that in 1929, when Pablo Neruda was in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a diplomat, he raped his Tamil maid and then wrote about it in his memoirs - a passage that has largely gone unnoticed or ignored and even today, is barely mentioned… "
                                                                                          - The Guardian, November 23, 2018

All the boys in my English class love him, love his politics, love his language, love his love. Johnny carries around Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in the front pocket of his Jansport bag, sends lines to girls with hair longer than me. Johnny is white and recognizes his privilege. He believes in the power of poetry and God. Johnny wants to find true love. I just like the way Johnny smells, like Cool Water cologne and the smoky haze of a Radiohead concert. We meet in the school bathroom. We meet in the bar. It is February, and we meet at the park where I saw a homeless man die on a bench. Johnny teaches me the art of silence that month. I deflower my tongue with Mama’s sewing needle, split muscle down the middle into two beasts: left tongue for Johnny, right tongue for Neruda. No tongue for me. No space in my mouth left to swallow.  She was wearing a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest cloth. She had heavy bangles on her bare ankles. I was born to a woman who spun silk from sinew and unraveled wooden idols to light a stove. I was born to a woman who fist fought two bandits for the key to a house she built from her own spine and exalted with moonflesh. I was born to a woman to a woman with skin like burning coal. She teaches me to use jewelry like a weapon and Johnny likes to kiss me with tongue in the train station, eyes staring blankly at the wall behind me. Johnny’s favorite poet is Pablo Neruda. He fancies himself a young Che Guevara and he’s growing out a beard. He thinks he’s into Marxist-Leninism. He thinks he’s a late stage capitalist. I tell Johnny that Neruda raped his maid. The encounter was of a man with a statue.  Johnny tells me all great artists are complicated. I was born to a woman who said men only use the word complicated when they cheat on you. Johnny will never cheat on me. Johnny is still in love with his ex-girlfriend. He likes skinny white girls and tells me I’m not his type. Johnny just wants weed, a record player, and a girl who understands. What he means is he wants a girl who is down for a threesome and has hips so small she can fit burgers in the margins of her jeans. I tell him I’m Hindu so I can’t do that, and Johnny likes my culture. Like a shy jungle animal she belonged to a different existence. He tastes my skin like a rabid dog. He smells the soot that lays claim to my hair, the recalcitrant curls like scalpel tearing through rippling flesh.  She was so lovely. Dark beauty. We make out in the backyard. We make out on the fire escape. He touches the rim of my thigh and my eyes rust like a breath before confession. Or April before the greening. Her eyes stayed open the whole time impassible. Johnny goes on mission trips to Guatemala every year and maybe he’ll go to India next summer. He says maybe he’ll build an orphanage or see my family on the streets. I tell Johnny my family lives in houses. I was born to a woman in a house. I was born to a woman who spat teeth into grease fire and called it a meal. I was born to a woman to a woman who braided coupons into fish wire and twisted wire into guns. But Johnny can’t wait to tour the slums and he wants to be a photographer for National Geographic. Johnny says he wants an independent woman. What he really means is he hates it when his girlfriend makes more money than him, so I quit my job as a freelance model. Johnny wants to go to Prague. Johnny doesn’t want to leave California. Johnny goes to NYU and tweets #blacklivesmatter under a Neo-Nazi thread. Johnny doesn’t know what he wants to do in life. He drifts. He capsizes. He experiments. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. Johnny knows he is white and he wants to change the world. He doesn’t want to go into consulting but he needs to make money. He doesn’t want to be a sellout so he starts a non-profit to teach literacy to underprivileged children, and because it is Johnny, this means let me rape your lush brown mouth with proper nouns. Johnny reads Cien Sonetos de Amor on the subway and discovers the meaning of life. Neruda wrote a whole book of love poems, you know. He elegized a lifetime of love and Johnny sends me A Dog Has Died and nudes over Snapchat.  Neruda didn't know what love was. He looked at his women with basement eyes. I tell Johnny that Neruda raped his maid and Johnny tells me that I’m pretty. Walking like a dusky statue came the most beautiful woman I had yet seen. Johnny reads The New Yorker so he tells me that Neruda facilitated the arrival of democracy in Chile. Johnny is always quoting things that get caught in my hair. Like thistles in a spiderweb I brush them away, rip apart adjective clauses.  There was no language I could talk with her. Johnny tells me I’m mispronouncing caramel. I was born to a woman who calcified jaw into ten beautiful hyacinths and bristled at the mouth. I was born to a woman to a woman who paid taxes in a new language. I was born to a woman who said daughter, never marry a white man. Said men like that could never understand. Said their love was an unlit match dangling precariously over the gas stove. Johnny kisses me and I can taste the colonist. I know he has held down my thousand grandmothers, cursed their paper bodies with famine. Sirens: One morning I decided to go all the way one morning I decided to go all the way one morning I decided to go all the way— Sometimes I hide in my closet and stroke my face. I was born to a woman who declared my body, the homeless shelter and never spoke again.  I was born to a woman named ghost who was born to a woman to a woman to a woman named ghost. I wear my mother’s phantoms like a necklace and Johnny pulls the cord tight. He holds down my neck and all the love sonnets in the world can not make up for the taste of burning flesh.  

She let me lead her, without a smile, and she was soon naked on my bed. Her skinny waist, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts, made her like one of the millennial sculptures from southern India. 

She was right to despise me.


Everything We Left Behind 
In my dreams, my grandmother and I are 
bodies of fat and light and we clasp our hands so 
tightly that even God knows to cry. I am in love
with her and her marbled flesh. We walk through her first home.
Cursed city. I watch her shed the years, watch them whisper into the clouds 
like linens drying under the hot sun. Here is her house that burned down. 
Here is the temple next to the fruit orchard. Here is where the 
neighbors threw rocks. She was only 11 when 
the world ended. Pakistan, 1947. She tells me the men would rather
drown their daughters than let them be taken. 
I picture a thousand Ophelias: the white dresses billowing,
the river water scything their breathless skin in rivulets, their heads
bobbing up and down Ravi River like a string of pearls. 
I wonder if they filled their pockets with stones or if they just accepted
the darkness, the finality of it all: if they wanted it, if it felt like a
mother’s womb, if they were aching to return home.