Teja Sudhakar
Two POEMS
On Navratri, My Mother Asks Me to Come Home
My mother stripes vermillion between my brows.
Before the nine steps, we pray with arms curled.
My body is clean of meat, and I smell of jasmine.
I hide the dirt-colored bruises on my neck. I smell of death,
petals, and ash. It is the third day of the war
goddess’ festival. Across the earth
the monsoon has ended, and the farmers
tug their empty hands from the dirt. Here,
in Kentucky, the leaves drop before they bleed.
Little green deaths, lying flat. Here, they have no words
for what happens in between. My mother braces
my shoulder. It is the third day of worship,
so I press fruits in the palms of women.
There is no dirt on them; they are clean
mirrors. Before the nine steps we exchange
our languages. What is your word for
war rooted in cracked soil. When the monsoons end
the riverbeds will swell down. Across the water
the green ghosts lie still and flat. Farmers’ hands buried
in the dirt digging. What is your word for
poetry that leaves dirt-colored bruises. The women
wipe stray vermillion from their fingertips
into the hollow of their necks. Before the nine steps
we bleed. Across the monsoon river, it is the third day
of prayer.
En Route to India, Another Crisis of Faith
—AFTER TARFI FAIZULLAH
In a Philadelphia airport newsstand
the National Geographic holds the demure face
of a woman I’ve never met, but have.
Hafiza, my grandmother and not,
a woman I could know in another
language. Age lines river
down and across her face; she looks out
at nothing. Her cataract-clouded eyes hold
a blood-banked land. My jigar-gosha are enemies
of one another—her only two sons at war,
their tanks crossing the borders of her stretched
lips. A rose in her throat where words should be.
Does Hafiza own a copy of this magazine,
or know the stretch of her image, its glossy cover?
I could only guess, as I wait with my mother
for something close to a cheesesteak. In Doha,
I lick the salt and fat of overpriced french fries,
watch the merge of brown faces flood
each slicked gate. I make eye contact
the way you would with a mirror: afraid,
and knowing. On the plane I organize
my limbs every which way, slant them
between the oval window, metal arm rest,
my mother’s hard elbow. I am tired
of my body’s demands, my want to be clean and soft,
my want to empty, to be full. To push
hot air inevitably, inevitably, against my paper walls.
There are strangers and strangers here who nearly look like
someone I know, or someone I could. In two days I will see
my grandmother, discover what might lie behind her clouded eyes.
Hafiza on the verandah, opening our rusted gate, Hafiza.
Back in Philly, I almost stole the magazine, but didn’t.
Poet’s name is a first-year MFA poetry student studying poetry at Indiana University. A native of Chennai, India, and long-time resident of Lexington, KY, their work explores queer and immigrant narratives of the transnational South. They currently live and write in Bloomington, IN, with their cat Soup.