Image: “Celestial” by Julia Muench, fiber art, 50×74 in., 2019
Karthik Sethuraman
Featured Poet
After Waking
Flame, hushed to embers, exhaled into a final
syllable of smoke. Can I call this a prayer? A wet
wick, sesame oil, matches under straw, and
when I lock the door to the house, I remind myself
death is a matter of fact not judgment. At least,
I hope so. My father and sister drove to the hospital
a while ago, and I haven’t silenced my phone, hidden
from any emergency, missed my mother moving
from bed to bed. I swear I’ve asked for safe passage
even when I don’t believe in highwaymen or tolls
for doors shut. My mother does, and she talks to me
about the things she can, the cost of butter, its weight
in our veins, how to fry an eggplant and save a portion
for a child who doesn’t dine at home. When my father talks
to her surgeon, he lowers himself, and I think every absence
is polluted with some kind of news. Earlier, I marked
every mention of her name with a blessing but sometimes
I double marked and stuttered. In elementary school,
my speech therapist explained that some children
find concepts they can’t articulate and pause, hold
themselves, stretch each sound into a question, a prayer.
When she opens her mouth, her first words are to
my father. He smiles like we do when we cannot hurt
the ones we love, so she looks to me. As a child,
whenever we watched the weather, she would complain
about promises of partial sunlight and passing clouds.
If we could be that simple, I imagine my mother,
after a few days in bed, would rise and reanimate,
know every forecast, where they begin and end.
I haven’t held my words for a long time now, and
I don’t intend to, but she shakes her head, saves
herself for another day. I don’t know if she still
tampers with smoke detectors, if she trades
americium for silver, lines it under her mattress.
If she’d let me, I might have lifted her shoulder,
traced the routes of the bandits, what they stole,
their leftover tracks, the great train robbery. Some day,
she’ll tell me I never could lie to her but how could I
— she’s sleeping on her side, I shake her from
a dream, a water tower with the lock jimmied,
a boy in the middle floating, wading, and she asks
why I woke her now. I say someone had to.
Unclad Roughness
after Forugh Farrokhzad
Against idleness, you warn me
— too many portraits, one for
another with hourly calamity
so we delay a day, a month,
every morning casting a net —
I’ve roamed too far pretending to
bridge some unknown distance.
This form is indicative of that where
by two or three in the afternoon
in a neighbor’s yard, hidden from
delirium, you cross my lips, slipping
into the corner, my cheek, and what
time is it when I unfurl the blanket,
tuck in your fingers, and what do
you know as the hours move across
your face. Do you hear this poem, me
saying many things, knowing none.
If I brush your hair, tug at the curtains,
a buzzing, my mouth, a path barely
lit to where waiting is contested
by present, future, by the boy who,
fetching his lawnmower, knocks on
my head, and when I turn into the heat
next to you, the wake. Like us, a poem
may meander, revisit old loves, step
into their homes to find them frozen
in great mysteries or nearer in small
silences. They may hold each other
tightly, clavicles arched, remaining
unsure of how and when to pass.
Ectoplasm
When someone
when I
crash into my
my own
body
I’m left with pieces
a trail of crumbs to my
sternum, hollow.
I cradle
an egg tip it against my
thumb
against my nose sharp in
the milky air
the scent of
sunshine against the wall.
Careful
the soul within
wet half-shaped, orienting
itself along my axes
metronome
chirping with
the ticks on my watch
my pulse in its mouth. On
occasion I taste venom
feel fissure
look for my
syringe to draw the distance
into a capsule mark it for
safe disposal.
A shadow
drifts under the door
keeps me company
suggests words to say while
I rest my eyes
staring into another room
a night lamp delineating
who is
who isn’t.
Most of being
is this way myself
& myself
separated by a thin, hard
membrane
waiting for
the moment we break.
Prayer mistaking silence for love
Which words when taken
from me will taste metallic
in my mouth
before buying groceries
must I pray
must I pray for milk
for its shape
mixing in the mouths
of different men
for the word itself
perched on the lips
of the brave
for my way of
coming to terms
with what I see when
I sit next to my sister
the honeysuckle tucked
under her hair
the hymn marching through
my mother’s tongue the fire
kissing her hands and the
hands of her love my father
watching his father
in a frame tying a knot
around his mother’s neck
it goes down easy
blood chilled just right
and who am I to ask
about truancy the only day
I skipped school I found a
duck in our backyard
her eyes grey and green
in patches huddled
over hatchlings
suckling them or
maybe my biology is
wrong but I remember
asking my mother to
leave out some milk
and her lukewarm reply
honey, don’t you know
to save yourself for those
who can use you.
Procession
For and after Stanley Plumly
I need to know how a thing lingers, sunlight spilling
into a room I know is shuttered and its scent, bare
like the space behind my mother’s hand, a memory
I file into meter by meter where someone, some
other me, extends past a closed door like noontime
or a story, another one my mother rests behind.
What waits behind the blinds, if I could open them?
Before sunset, only a knock at the door and a glass
of water, the weight of the walls and their fullness.
And so much coldness, more than maps of adjacent
plots or their vacantness, my mother lying behind some
other, leaving gaps in her story for me to linger,
holding on to what little I know in my nakedness,
my mother like a winter carrying her shade inside.
