അമ്മ (Amma)
My Amma’s Malayalam is Trivandrum slang,
shifting between simple
churidar and formal sari in a blink.
Tag: migration
please see where the blood is darkest on my drawn brow
I lost the metaphor
along with some luggage
that I never carried
and children
I was never meant to bear
Appa
sliced onions fried with miris and sugar
spotted with chili seeds
creating fire within my tummy
the spicy seeni sambol wrapped in
soft crunchy appa remind
my taste buds that they are alive
airplane
where is it? the child
scrambles underneath
her skirt
& below the skin…
We Take What We’re Given
I’d like to say I met a wonderful guy during my teenage years who disproved this notion, made me feel lovable, or that I somehow reached a higher level of consciousness between bell choir and Latin class and decided it was enough to love myself. I didn’t. It would take about fifteen years, when I moved outside of the United States, for a significant shift in my thinking. During the in-between years, despite beautiful friendships, academic accolades, and moving to college in New York City, my weight consumed me…
HOME
this will not be your diaspora poem:
we have enough milk & honey
at the grocery store
and golden nubian gap-toothed queens who long for their mother
africa…
Aircraft Cabin
Home is a collection of things
/ It is a hand-crafted alibi to prove
/ You danced, wore,
/ read, wrote, breathed…
stuart highway
i like remote places
/ indian-owned coffee shops
/ in nowhere oman
/ darjeeling or
/ west virginia…
fourth wall
we all know it / is fashionable to talk about it / home, that unpretty / thing only in poems …
On Writing in English
My relationship with English began with the need to forsake my origin, to renounce my identity…
Q Train
what is a place but / a postcard chewed out by memory / a conveyor belt of baggage / with its locks smashed up…
Arrivals and Departures
I remember a journey I once took. Well, actually, it was just two weeks ago. Somehow, all ‘intense’ life experiences only seem to happen in the random moments. You’ll come home from school one day and realize that your mother has wrinkles. She has wrinkles and the sun is setting and you are getting older […]
