after Bob Hicok

I do not want my mother to die. My mother does not want her mother to die. Her mother does not want her husband to die. Her husband does not want his son to die. His son does not want his daughter to die. His daughter is too young to pronounce death, let alone decipher it. Three days later, when her grandfather will die, she’ll be braiding her doll’s hair. Thirty-six years later, when her father will die, she’ll be looking, with ocean eyes, at her six-year-old daughter braiding the hair of her doll. Three days later, tired of the doll, her daughter will ask her the question she did not ask her mother: where do they go? She won’t know what words to put in her mouth, so she’ll leave her mouth open. She’ll chew on it all night. Nobody wants to go somewhere they can’t return from, do they? But then, who wants to go so far only to return? My father cuts the strings of kites when they’re way up in the sky. The world is full of kites like these.

First Published in Rattle, 2022

SELECTED POEMS

Whalelore

TAB Journal, 2024

Love Letters

The Good Life Review, 2024

How to Quit

HOAX, 2024

A braid of unknowing I tie before you

North American Review, 2023

I don’t think it’s fair

The Maine Review, 2023

Things with which we foul the Ganges

Cincinnati Review, 2023 (Nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Best Spiritual Literature)

Denial Dances on a Moonless Street in the Arms of Blame

Midway Journaal, 2023 (Winner of the 1000-Below Prize)

Dida

Colorado Review, 2023

There is no time here

Bellevue Literary Review, 2023 (Editor’s Choice Honorable Mention for the John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry)

Water under the bed

Margins, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 2023

Rings of Saturn

Banshee Press, 2023

sleep fragments

since he refuses to speak

I observe him sleep

the whole experience is akin

to crossing an ocean

walking on a bridge of stones

except it's not stones it's electricity

and the ocean's not an ocean

but your father's soul

a ten-inch mattress

rests on the floor

(the bed too far

off the ground for me)

beside ma's divan

 

uneasy as time                 he moves

from one side to another

ever changing

his position like Jupiter

 

one could be so restless

only in a body

they wish                          to escape

 


my voice is your voice

my empty chair your empty chair

my budding bald spot your bald head

my wakeful sleep your wakeful sleep

 

*

 

what if all these poems about you

are a film losing everything

good about the book

 

*

 

the Jupiter of his body collides

with the divan

one afternoon  I reveal he hums in his sleep

 

there is no one who does not

some babble      others sing gospels

 

*

 

perhaps if we said please

please rain         please Tuesday

please sleep

 

 

no alcoholic steps into the same sleep twice

is a poem beginning

there was a time my father

or a poem fashioned from his insomnia

a portrait of the father or the poet

or both or neither

 

*

 

so glad your snores are yours

night                   an orchestra of insects

sleep                    an abandoned hall

 

*

 

you've got to be a ceiling fan to understand any of this

all dreams          memory after waking

all words            law after believing

 

*

the body bleeds out the night's undoing

here we are again   awake   he murmurs to himself   alive

First publishing in The Ocotillo Review, 2023

holding the fingers of water

adda, Commonwealth Foundation, 2023

My childhood & its scent of a bird caressed

Finalist for the Literary Taxidermy Award, 2022

The Table

Plume Poetry, 2022

Ghazal for Dida

Rattle, 2022 | Ledbury Poetry Prize Honorable Mention, Selected by Anthony Anaxagorou

Euphemisms

Winner of the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, 2021, Selected by Mark Doty, Nominated for the Pushcart Prize

What it is is what it is not and what it is not is what it is

Winner of the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2021

This one’s barely about him

At times I feel their voice like the fingers

of a pickpocket in my coat. Unlike police,

they witness crimes, scrounge

for fruit flesh, piss in quiet

corners, play in parks to kill

time. I trip over the first-person

every morning going for a run,

extract each metaphor like

a rusted nail from my shoe, eye the voice

fall from a nest sewn into the yellow flame

of an ashoka branch. I flee the rest,

leave rat poison in my car

at sunfall. They do not die,

by midnight smuggle

in through the only window, lie

all over each other, weep. Last week,

one was trapped naked in the lift

while trying to find the rest,

couldn’t leave until morning

when the sweeper rescued it.

My poems do not have a house.

My father does not allow

them inside. Hunchbacked,

coal-skinned, skinny,

two/two-and-a-half feet tall,

they do not deserve mirrors

in his eyes. They roam

over foam-rot city sewers,

rub shoulders with rikshawallahs.

Street dogs chase them. Some crouch

in crumbling mosques that line the lips

of Delhi. Others huddle beneath the bells

of old crowded temples. All smoke

the black words in letters never posted.

Now it fears closed places,

refuses to sleep in the car, lays

on the corner of the road that is mostly holes,

my old gym t-shirt its bed. A witness

to its will to live, I nurse it

and the others every night, grant rain

through the radio to allow

them dreamlessness. Upon waking,

they attempt to find an end

but instead of periods

return with a language composed

entirely of commas, a question mark,

and a broken parenthesis. My father again

dispels them. Again, we cobble

a home from his screams.

First Published in Poetry Ireland, 2024