Three Poems

Mother Tongue

In Bangla, language, ভাষা (bhasha), and home, বাসা (basha),
could be homophones, except
ভ (bha) descends like droplets of monsoon rains
and ব (ba) bursts like a prickly jackfruit.
Before my mother was born,
acres upon acres of blood spilled
to root homes and a language to a country’s
meadowed graveyard. Oceans away from my birth
and almost illiterate in Bangla,
I know I am a stray.

My mother kept a small journal of poems:
the blue sheen of timber canoes at sunset,
what prayers she recited, the name
she wanted: light, আলো (alo).
Somewhere, the frayed pages are dispersed,
matras weaving together valleys
of character after character.
Beneath a feathery sky, she felt জ (ja)
elongate like a river parting land,
শ (sha) hook the morning dew,
consonants waft vowels as vessels
towards the great bay,
each syllable salivating with ichor.

Wildflowers from Volubilis

Inside a doorway: a house
reduced to blocks. Edged between them, strands of wildflowers
fling open.

When these arches weather to black,
what can remain of these ruins? Don’t know who lived here,
only that

she opened the door for the
last time, engrossed in these vast, grassy fields, assured they’ll
spring again.

Meditation on Distances

There is an ambulance-sized space on the road.
All of these people I did not know—gone.
Pathogens had seeped into their skin,
unstitched the borders of their bodies:
blood drifting into the wind,
veins rusting like dull lampposts.
Quarantined, I imagine one-woman films.
Picture an ending scene: a wide, secluded river
with a cerulean stream.
Bare, I submerge into it. The river knows
my suffering from the former world.
And so, it bathes me as if it birthed me from its banks.
Beads of water streak across my shoulder
blades—I hold a piece of the river,
it holds me back.

I never learned how to overcome the distance
between us: exhales of defeated breaths,
heat from a pair of hands. The closest I’ve come
is at a hospital visit for a distant great-aunt,
small and squirming like a newborn.
Fibers of freckled, loose flesh
drape over her hard, white bones.
Time passes in intervals between coughs.
In that room, air hangs like clothes left
underneath the sun for far too long.
I stand in the stench worn by her skin, dripping
into mine, shrinking the line separating us.
We inhale this air, our air, strung from spit
and snot, in and out, out and in.

And another ending scene: in the river’s mouth,
kernels of silt plunge to its belly. I do, too.
Limbs contracting towards my chest,
back curling to a pit, ropes of hair fanning out.
When I reach the streambed,
a stillness surges through me.

Sound returns, again: the bitter aftertaste
of my voice leaking down my throat.
It’s summer, the sky ablaze as a wound.
I think of dipping my bangs in cotton-candy-blue,
dye dripping down my back, splattering
the sink like a sunset.
But where I lie, grains of dust film
over the floors, like a blanket of fog.
The walls thicken and the dust billows
and my voice ricochets from the bones in my head,
its bellow swallowing my mouth,
and the pulse of the earth becomes too far, seasons away,
and I collapse.

And another ending scene: I dream
of the ocean as a hometown.
Salt-laden air slips into my tongue.
Here, all of my past tenses are lost
in these waves, strong as a mother’s arms.
Here, lies everything I will become.
I leap from this machine-wired form
into the cold, blue current.
Particles pass through me like I am moonlight,
without skin to clasp.
Sinking, I dissolve.