solvaaya

[solvaaya]

The Migrant's Reply by Indran Amirthanayagam. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: Our eyes are dry. Our breath needs washing. What next? You are putting up a wall on your Southern flank? What an irony. The country that accepts refugees does not want us. We qualify. We have scars and our host governments hunted

at least some of us. The rest fled in fear. Gangs do not spare even the children. White vans took away our uncles, our cousins. Do you think they have been made into plowshares? Ay, what are you saying? Too easy. Too easy to wear our hearts

in these words, in slings, on our faces, furrowed, perplexed.]

[solvaaya]

Make Believe by Jaswinder Bolina. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: It’s that time when I’m alone in America with my young daughter who startles

herself realizing the woodpile beneath that black oak is itself formerly a tree, and she wants to know whether these trees have feelings.

It’s this acquaintance with death she so improves upon annually.]

[solvaaya]

Tiger Mask Ritual by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: The mask is raw and red as bark against your facebones. You finger the stripes ridged like weals out of your childhood. A wind is rising in the north, a scarlet light like a fire in the sky.]

[solvaaya]

Sujata Bhatt, from “Search for My Tongue”, Point No Point: Selected Poems

[solvaaya]

Dear, beloved by Sumita Chakraborty. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: The girl would have been twenty-four. This was my visio. Sometimes I think of it as prophecy. Other times, history. For years it was akin to some specific land, with a vessel that would come for me, able to cross land, sea, the spaces of the universe, able to burrow deep into the ground. Anything could summon it —— a breaking in cloud cover, wind chimes catching salt outside my mother’s window, a corner of a painting. And I learned how to call it, too. This is the only skill of which I have ever been proud.]

[solvaaya]

HE REPLACES POETRY by Meena Kandasamy. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID:

Two months into love and today I turn into a whore Hunting for words, tearing them out from soiled sheets Of mind or pinching them from the world like removing Jade-green flecks from tiger’s eyes. . . And poetry refuses Entry into my mirrored life that is bequeathed to him.]

[solvaaya]

Narrowing Hallway by Raza Ali Hasan. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: The unkempt beard of the fearsome mullah overwhelms the two aging poets from the periphery, the far-flung provinces of Iran and Iraq.]

[solvaaya]

Home by Kazim Ali. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: My mother had stayed behind in the house, unable to go on pilgrimage. She had told me the reason why.

Being in a state considered unacceptable for prayers or pilgrimages.

I asked if she would want more children and she told me the name she would give a new son.

I always attribute the fact that they did not, though my eldest sister’s first son was given the same name she whispered to me that afternoon, to my telling of her secret to my sisters when we were climbing the stairs.

It is the one betrayal of her—perhaps meaningless—that I have never forgiven myself.

There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make.]

[solvaaya]

Oklahoma by Hala Alyan. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: For a place I hate, I invoke you often. Stockholm’s: I am eight years old and the telephone poles are down, the power plant at the edge of town spitting electricity. Before the pickup trucks, the strip malls, dirt beaten by Cherokee feet. Osiyo, tsilugi. Rope swung from mule to tent to man, tornadoes came, the wind rearranged the face of the land like a chessboard. This was before the gold rush, the greed of engines, before white men pressing against brown women, nailing crosses by the river, before the slow songs of cotton plantations, the hymns toward God, the murdered dangling like earrings. Under a redwood, two men signed away the land and in history class I don’t understand why a boy whispers sand monkey. The Mexican girls let me sit with them as long as I braid their hair, my fingers dipping into that wet black silk. I try to imitate them at home — mírame, mama — but my mother yells at me, says they didn’t come here so I could speak some beggar language. Heaven is a long weekend. Heaven is a tornado siren canceling school. Heaven is pressed in a pleather booth at the Olive Garden, sipping Pepsi between my gapped teeth, listening to my father mispronounce his meal.]

[solvaaya]

After Iraq Sweidan by Hala Alyan. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: Today I cut calories but at night I eat worms. I won’t say what I paid for this mattress. You can’t put a price on good sleep. You can’t put a corpse back together. One bomb dives into the sky like a rose. If I don’t say rose, you’ll skip ahead to the end. I think I’m in love with the murdered poet.]

[solvaaya]

Empty Space by Amrita Pritam. (Translated from Punjabi by D.H. Tracy & Mohan Tracy) Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: There were two kingdoms only: the first of them threw out both him and me. The second we abandoned.]

[solvaaya]

Indigo by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.T ext ID under cut.

[Text ID: In the worksheds, we dip our hands, their violent forever blue, in the dye, pack it in great embossed chests for the East India Company. Our ankles gleam thin blue from the chains. After that night many of the women killed themselves. Drowning was the easiest.]

[solvaaya]

WE WILL REBUILD WORLDS by Meena Kandasamy. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: poured poison and pesticide through the ears-nose-mouth/ or hanged them in public / because a man and a woman dared to love and you wanted / to teach / other boys and other girls / the lessons of / how to / whom to / when to / where to / continue their caste lines and we will refresh your mind with other histories / of how you brutally murdered and massacred our peoples / with the smiling promise of / heaven in the next birth / and in this / a peace that / never belonged.]

[solvaaya]

The Immigrant's Song by Tishani Doshi. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: Let us not speak of men, stolen from their beds at night. Let us not say the word                                            disappeared. Let us not remember the first smell of rain. Instead, let us speak of our lives now— the gates and bridges and stores. And when we break bread in cafés and at kitchen tables with our new brothers, let us not burden them with stories of war or abandonment.]

[solvaaya]

How to be Happy in 101 Days by Tishani Doshi. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: Offer your bones to someone. Clavicles are the chief seducers of the human body. When you hear the snap, allow yourself a shudder. Find a tree to hold all the faces of your dead—their hair, their rings. Hang their solemn portraits from branches. If you cannot find happiness in death you will not complete the course. ]

[solvaaya]

Aubade Ending with the Death of a Mosquito by Tarfia Faizullah. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: silent—sister,                            because you drew from me                            the coil of red twine: loneliness— spooled inside—                            once, I wanted to say one                            true thing, as in, I want more in this life,                            or, the sky is hurt, a blue vessel—                            we pass through each other, like weary                            sweepers haunting through glass                            doors, arcing across gray floors]

[solvaaya]

Dear, beloved by Sumita Chakraborty. Text ID under cut.

[Text ID: Lover, each time I kiss you I name after you a sickly feeling in my own body, as if each ailing is a previously undiscovered moon orbiting a planet that can only sustain the strangest of life-forms.]