Poetry, Week 50: Arvinder Kaur Johri
We buried her deep because
whatever she said happened. Trees kissing my locks while dragons
lay floating on my front porch. The neighbor’s newborn swapped
with a girl in the municipal hospital. Ectopic pregnancy. Migration
to a strange land, where nothing was scarce and nothing was equal.
When she felt the swamp in her stomach, she gathered me in her
arms and said, your mother will die a day after her cancer diagnosis.
And your ascetic, absent father will live to be 105.
Her intentions were pure and her toenails were decaying, so we
brought her home. Fed her until she died. Because she was prophetic
and empty, the swamp inside her grew greedily. On our last wedding
anniversary, we found her frozen and wet under the magnolia tree
in the neighbor’s yard. Kissed her eyes, covered her in blankets,
and very gently closed her lips. I could hear her heart almost breaking
with what remained unsaid. Now, I fear living without her third eye.
Turbaned Warriors of 1984
When death hangs from the hemline
of your turban, part with your head,
not your turban. May the turbaned head
only bow to his mother and the departed
soul fly back to her bosom. For what
is a Sikh without a pure, fearless soul?
My brother is under the staircase. His puny frame rolls under the ladder. When the smell
of charred skin dissipates, we unlock the closet and coax him into the kitchen. Later, he drags
himself to the storage room. I untie his bun. His hair stretches like my mother’s sari drying
on the terrace. Covering our balcony with baby elephants atop lotuses in diagonals
of grey columns. I am the older one. I comb his hair. And the hair of all our jointly owned
dolls. Some with woolen hair. Some with nylon braids. Some with permanent hair partings.
Some with singed split ends. Our Beji reads a few verses from Guru Granth Sahib. Picks
scissors from my paint box. Holds me to her chest. Offers the verse-bathed scissors
to my brother. We unbraid his hair. Untangle all the knots. Comb until our hands feel bruised. My
brother folds deeper into the crevices of the ladder. His hair: a blanket on our restless bodies.
Under the blanket I see. I see turbaned warriors riding elephants mushrooming from the floor.
Resting their trumpets on his hair.
Arvinder Kaur Johri is an Indian-born educator and poet who resides in Northern Virginia. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Sahitya Academi, The Shore, Solstice, The Inflectionist Review and Driftwood Press. Johri’s poems explore memory, death, relationships, and displacement. Her academic interests include inequities in education, intersectionality, and writing identities.