Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Seven Vignettes

1.

The water
I drink
Comes from Daisy,
The glacier.

Last week
I heard
She miscarried.

2.

Above all
You and I
Are inter-racial,
Babe.

Illegal,
In the eyes,
Of our Nation’s history.

3.

Unfortunate,
The smell of coffee
Reminds you
Of break ups,
And a brother’s death.

Adopted,
But still.

4.

You find Zen
In war movies,
Hurricanes,
And cotton candy.

Your goal, now,
Is to be
An entomology assistant. 

5.

I woke up
This morning
To Neptune,
Screaming.

Afraid,
I let the constellations,
Sleep in my basement.

6.

You tell
The ice-cream seller,
Depression, should be
A new flavor,
For 2016.

A light sorbet,
With blackcurrants,
Coconut flakes,
And lemon zest.

7.

There comes a point
In perspective
When everything
Becomes homogenous.

People,
Personality,
Hair color.
Even salt from pepper.

Mind

My mind is,
to my body,
a source of allergy.

Monday, March 28, 2016

Morning Meditations

1.

I sit at the table -
and observe my shadow
crystallize
into bulbs of translucent tears,
like rain, dangling
from my ceiling's underbelly.
Buckling down,
from the weight of a million streaks of sunlight.
The sun itself, a gold lozenge -
dissolving behind a sheet of clouds.

2. 

The magnolia tree,
waits for me, beside the strawberry field,
with blossoming flowers, magenta
and white, looking
like taxidermy butterflies frozen in a V.

I used to sit under its muscular branches 
and read aloud, poetry
from Claudia Emerson's Late Wife -
About a dead wife and her X-rays,
the remains of a broken marriage,
and a few artifacts of love.

3.

Every night, after darkness settles over you
like a woven blanket,
I tip toe in and out of our bedroom,
to muffle any sounds of my presence.
We are to be lovers, I thought.
We are to commit to the mitzvah
of matrimony, a few years from today.

But I have lost myself to Winter.
And what is left of me is a fevered shadow
of what used to be, an exoskeleton.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Coffee

Even though you walked out of the cafeteria
after our little disagreement,
your words lingered in the air
for a few minutes
and fell into my coffee mug

Spring muses

1.

Outside my window,
white birds are perched on a tree
like bolls of cotton.

They chatter, awkwardly,  
like step-sisters
recently reunited.  

2.

At the busy airport,
I listen to, on my audio device,
Aretha Franklin.

You make me feel
You make me feel
You make me feel
like a natural woman.

You really do.

3.

Yesterday
while coming back home,
my plane got into an argument with a cloud
about health insurance premiums.

4.

I have replaced
the mirror in my living room
with a cube of sugar.

In this way, I can see
the sweeter side of you.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Armantrout

From your entire book
of Pulitzer verses
a single phrase
repeats in my head
like a prayer. 

'an undiscovered tumor
squats on her kidneys'

 

Closet

for Brandy Kay

I took your words
and stored them in my closet
with moth balls
and a pocket square

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Coral Springs

*
From the cockpit you could see
the moon
asleep
on a pillow of clouds.

*
Tell me, Miranda,
do you miss Jamaica?

You say,
I miss the voice
of satin waves.

*
We spent
all afternoon in Coral Springs
auscultating
palm trees,
sea shells,
and the ocean breeze.

*
This morning
the sky was the color
of a cyanotic baby.
Asphyxiated with vines
and oleander stems.

Finally, the sun rose in stilts.
And morning broke
into a million pieces.

Friday, March 18, 2016

Perishable

While you were away for lunch today,
I walked to the post office
and mailed to you, in a white envelope,
a drop of rain
a crayon from my second birthday
and a cloud that I caught this morning.  

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Missing

Do you miss me?
You ask.

To which I say,

I miss you
like I would
my phantom limb.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

At The Dead of Night

Sometimes, when you ask me,
feeling restless at the dead of night -
Tom, do you honestly love me?

I say to you
in gentle whispers -
You're the closest I've come to happiness.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Weekend Musings

I.

Something about the number
Three
Makes my heart stop.

I watch the traffic signal
dissolve into the sidewalk.

Moonlight sits on a blade of grass
and plays the saxophone.

The city feels acrobatic -
air tracing hula hoops
and bulb filaments swallowing light.
Behind closed doors,
there are orgasms and death alike;
Evocative.

Your face is an accumulation
of weed,
Winter,
and depression.
You talk to your windows,
as if they disobeyed and let clouds
slip into your medicine cabinet.

II.

At the sight of Spring, today
the woven butterflies with cotton antennae,
flapping their polka-dotted wings,
flew away from my sock prints - 
their home
for the past fourteen weeks. 

III.

You reminded me
that your in-laws are making you suicidal.
I listened to you unswallow your words,
push out air
from your lungs, so you may turn red
with cough.

They want your womb utilized.

Your husband entertains the prospect,
too.
Your womanhood is secondary to him.
Greedy, selfish,
Dutiful son.

And then you said,
Mother told me
I was dead, the day I was born.
Leaving in you a gaping scar,
that your in-laws furrow.
Adding acid to your blood -
You say, your words slurring in liquor.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Red Tulip

Before I could tell you
that my mother, yesterday,
had won a golf tournament,
you were on your way to the conference Downtown
on dismantling racism in medicine.

After you left,
I shut the door
and drank coffee in silence.
And spent an hour or more, wiping stains
the sun had left behind during yesterday's sunset.


Outside, clouds were weeping rain,
and winds were hissing at trees
coated with layers of Winter.

I noticed your ocean blue Littman stethoscope
laying down on the living room table,
its metallic ribs exposed to a napkin of darkness.
And I picked it up by its eartips and tapped
at the centers of the tunable diaphragms;
Anatomies,
that have amplified for you, sounds of life and death 

After a while, when the rain had collapsed into a trickle,
And the sky was a shred of dysmorphic clouds,
I put the stethoscope on the chest of a red tulip
standing, coyly, on my living room table, with crinkled lips
and angina. And all I heard was Silence.
I shifted the chestpiece to the region near the stem 
to hear sounds of tulip roots dining on fractions of atmosphere,
but all I heard again was Silence.
Petals, once asthmatic,
had de-pigmented. Ovaries had miscarried.
The anthers and filaments had lost their pollen
to exoskeletons of air currents. And tears had crusted
along their sepals. What remained now was only a red shell,
with magenta stripes and rigor mortis.

On my notebook, I recorded
Time of death, 9 am, Saturday, March Twelfth.

 

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

At the Limelight

What used to be
Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion
at the intersection of 20th Street
and Avenue of the Americas,
is now a gym
where men do drugs
and have sex in the showers.

How strange,
the concept of deconsecration.
To say,
God, you may now leave
your ex-home.
After a ball-point, a moment in time -
No more prayers are accepted here,
officially.

Perhaps this
has led my city to atheism.
It is also,
transgender.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Early Morning

Upon waking up this morning
I noticed
Sunlight peeling off my bedroom wall.

So I scraped off the flakes
Took out a paint brush,
And colored the gaps with broad strokes of yellow.

Monday, March 7, 2016

A Bird Song

Lined across my windowsill are
ten Mason jars
filled with chirps of sparrows
and sounds of rain
from last year's Spring.

I have allowed them to pickle
for thirty two weeks,
having sprinkled in each container
a few pinches of sunlight,
vinegar, and sugar cane smells.
And shut their lids tight,
so that politics may not dehydrate them.
 
Let the apparent lack of pigmentation
not lead you to believe
that the jars resemble blouses
of voiceless vacuum. 
On the contrary,
they are symbols of shapeless museums
that exhibit the season's  historic artifacts.
 
When Winter comes,
and my mind boils in depression,
the pickled bird songs
are my only catharsis.

One of them asked me this morning,
Daniel, do you think the word "periodic"
originated from time intervals of the menstrual cycle?

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Thai

At lunchtime today,
A red pepper flake -
floating on a pool
of coconut milk and cumin -
waved at me and said,
Harriet, I wish to be a Mother someday.

Friday, March 4, 2016

Table for Three

At dinner last night,
We sat at a table for three.

Drank wine in the candlelight,
And made a toast
To you and Love and me.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Across the table

Earlier this morning,
a ray of sunlight
sat quietly
on a red chair across from me.

Reading a newspaper.
Eating in silence.
Thinking.
 

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

My Name

At the time of business introductions, I
Almost always feel consumed by
A crippling strain of tension.
I feel on the edge.
My fingers tingle.
Pain shoots down my shoulder blades
With the force of electricity.   
But, I take a few sips of mineral water,
Harmonize breaths with heart beats,
And begin.  

Hi.
My name is Tanmoy.
Tan, as in getting a tan at summertime.
Moy, as in M-O-Y. Tanmoy.
I stop there,
And await eyes to dilate in confusion.
The eyebrows leave the ridges to wander away.
In a few moments, the chatter begins.
Perilous attempts are made
To stitch together phonemes, and alphabets
That have, unknowingly, escaped their sensory memory.
I witness the tongue rolls, jaws
Treading unfamiliar territories.
Tom boy? Tam-way? Oh, you mean Tambourine?
I notice the facial muscles, especially around
Their lip commissures and eyelashes,
Crinkle into parallel lines.

I observe, keenly, the transparent bubbles of mute smirks
Resurfacing onto cliffs of chins, wrapped in skin
And four-day stubbles. And, I see the noticeable discomfort
In grappling with the uncommonness of my name,
Precipitating behind a guise of exoticism,
Inoculating, subsequently, the audience with unease.

That is when I say, emphatically,
But you can call me Tom.
And hear a dozen sighs.

I resurrect a neutral smile.
I maintain a semblance of composure
That I have practiced, almost to perfection,
Since the second day of elementary school.
But my ears divulge secrets.
They turn red.
They resemble lobelia bulbs.
They look like ripe plums.
And they warm up, in shame.

It is easy to blame Mother and Father
For cherry-picking a name
That makes my sex non-apparent
And offers fodder to bullies, yielding
Seven hundred and twenty anagrams.
Permutations, and combinations, that range
From hilarious to offensive to petty.
Antyom, Mantoy, yotman?
But I don’t.
It would be unfair.
My name is out of context in a place
Far away from home,
Where the language is unheard of and the name
foreign.
Home, referring to the geography
of my first cry on Earth.

Someday, my ears will not betray.
Eyes will not rove away.  
Remembering you, Helen,
When you said over breakfast,
If they have learned the names
Of Tchaikovsky and Nefertiti,
They can learn yours too.
Never be ashamed.
Ever.