there is still hope

Sometimes I can think about Judith Butler and Michel Foucault after I step out of a patient's room.

Today I was the harbinger of bad news to a Mexican man who was likely an undocumented immigrant with no good source of longitudinal clinic care. The rules about what hospitals vs. clinics can do for you seemed very silly to me as I explained them, even though I know these institutions have different functions for good reasons.

Things in medicine that make you feel soulless: referring someone who you're pretty sure is unlikely to follow up.

Does this feeling get less shitty with time?

Do Guatemalan clinicians in government hospitals feel bad about this? Do they become blunted from repetitive interactions like this? Will I?

Today's amazing thing

This madrugada, I walked to the hospital under a storm and got drenched on my way in. This evening, I walked home from the hospital under the same storm and got drenched on my way back. Something about this felt beautifully cyclic and metaphoric for how we enter and exit this world.

A few blocks from my apartment, I found myself appreciating a yellowing gingko sapling under the light of a lamppost, resisting shedding its leaves in the downpour. Just a few fainted onto the sidewalk. And the rest clung on gracefully.

Trees. So resilient. So magnificent.

Nothing has inspired me to write for several months, so here are some things

Nothing has inspired me to write poetry since August 21st.

I can't think of a time in the last five years that I've gone three months without writing a poem.

This is an uncomfortable sign that life feels bland. And many distressing things are going on in the world. So I want to take stock of several amazing things that happened in the last week.

1. I read Mindy Kaling's "Is Everyone Hanging out without Me?" It was easy to read and not boring, which is much more than I can say about almost everything else I'm reading right now. I was laughing nearly the whole time. It felt good to have positive emotions. And also, now someone has written about being a nervous chubby Indian girl at the top of a diving board. Damn, girl. I know how your ten-year-old self felt. Thank you for sharing that with the world.

2. I watched the first few episodes of Aziz Ansari's new comedy, "Master of None." It made me laugh and cry. The representation of Indian people I grew up with was Apu from the Simpsons. And now there is a show that is mainstreaming at least some aspect of my second-generation immigrant experience of the United States. I want to think I've moved beyond identity politics, but this is how I felt when I walked into the Beyond Bollywood exhibit at the Smithsonian last year. Appreciative. Proud. Like a real, recognized human being. I've been feeling so unIndian and so unanything recently. I guess that part of me is still alive.

3. I ate a slice of honeycrisp apple with chopped cilantro and my palate exploded. In a good way. This was an accident. It only happened because I was too lazy to bust out a second cutting board. I am capable of enjoying food. I am still capable of being inspired by taste.

4. I have been swimming instead of studying. Swimming slowly, in the most unathletic way possible. (That's right, Mindy Kaling, our ten-year-old selves would be so proud of me now!) I experienced a "swimmer's mellow," which I'm naming after the "runner's high" I haven't felt since I was a waifish teenager. There's something about your fingers slicing through the water, over and over again, that's meditative.

These are all good things. If I ever read this in the distant future, cheers to these things.

black lives matter

in this city of black and white, where we lie
to ourselves about who is a human being, where we lie
on the street for four hours killed, our corpses feasts
for the eyes of media vultures flapping their wings,
desperately scavenging meaning,
new souls enter the world

we tell ourselves they matter, all these new lives matter
we keep watch over their heart tones even before they arrive
unaware of whose yellow bumps and jagged lines are whose
and we rush into their rooms and tell their mothers to push
and we yank these new souls out of their wombs

in this city of black and white, some births are joy
and tears and tears of joy streaming down the cheeks of
all the cheerleaders whose breath fogs the windows
at the sight of baby's blue-green-hazel-gray eyes

some births are unceremonious
some mothers reach out for a hand in a cold room where there is no hand
just a human in scrubs and sterile gloves at the end of the bed
who can't hold her hand back
who will welcome her black baby into a cruel world
into a cruel home north of delmar where there is no food
and baby will grimace in an incubator with eyes unadmired
and the sterile gloves will sew up her tears
and pretend that both of them aren't bleeding their way to a slow death

the end of sin

the end of sin is a sickening sock to the gut
a dark place that suddenly became darker
the way to the light at the end of the tunnel
is spelunking without a headlamp and brushing
up against the stalactites you were never
supposed to touch.

in this quiet cave i feel the seasons pass
the times i vowed to crawl forward dance like marionettes
suspended by my heart strings, one painful hop at a time,
the escape artist deluding herself with thoughts of siddartha
from the palace to the mountain, from sin to sanyasi

the darkness has weathered me

i wish to renounce

dip

in a parallel universe my eyes betrayed me
we jumped in the water and the mosquitos danced
around our exposed flesh and the sun in a moment
of modesty hid itself beneath the horizon

delivery

knowing the shape of your fingernails
the strange way they grow in uneven shapes
even when you cut them deliberately, perfectly
knowing, noticing without trying to pay attention
is love.

there is some love that you feel like waves rippling
over sand between your toes, ebbing and flowing,
pulling and dragging, vacillating, but calmly connecting you
to the earth.

there is some love that drags you out to sea
takes you far from the sand and keeps you afloat
as it destroys you, pulling you to the center
of the earth.

there is some love you were simply meant to feel
beating on your shoulders like the cold massage
of a waterfall, to revel, to dream for a moment
an experience you were meant to collect and discard
like the crescent moons and the thickened bands
of your clippings

The Coffee Table and the Maple Tree

On the edge of our seats, worn cushions the only furniture in an otherwise empty room, we eat out of politeness. The coconut is pleasant and familiar, the fried tapioca novel. My tongue puzzles over the flavor, the texture, as I study her hair, a little unkempt, her glasses, thick-framed, and her face, at once vibrant and sullen, at once aged and youthful. She is seventy years of life, seventy years of wisdom one only attains by embracing the bad cards she was dealt.

Feisty. She was always feisty. I scan my memories and find her standing at a table of sweets, years ago, after much of the crowd had left celebrations for navratri, the Hindu festival for the goddesses. She eyed the desserts one by one, glanced at my mother and me conspicuously, and, settling on a cashew-flavored delight, proclaimed, “To hell with diabetes!”

I admired her spirit. I still do.

Her husband is quiet. He always has been, lost in proofs and theorems, planning out his next lecture, conjuring and solving problems in that professorial way. She knows that we know his silence today is not scholarly contemplation, but a departure from a former self. He asked for our names not because he has not seen us in years, but because he does not remember who we are.

We hear the story of her life as bricolage. One moment, her mother is widowed young by her father who never took his medicines. One moment, she has congestive heart failure and 57% lung function. One moment, her eighteen-year-old self is married and finds herself in a new land, a new era. One moment, her brother has invited them to spend the rest of their days in California, but she would miss the seasons too much, the life spurting from the trees as the dead of winter gives way to the marvel of spring. It wouldn’t feel like Christmastime, she says, under sunshine and palm trees. It remains unspoken that he gets lost walking in the neighborhood where they have spent the last fifty years.

They are selling the house and moving to India. There is a Chinese saying, she tells us, about the fallen leaves returning to their roots. She can’t remember quite how it goes, but she gazes out to the patient maple tree in the front yard, and we all can picture its leaves yellowing and browning in the fall, drifting downwards, and laying themselves to their final rest on the ground, where they will disintegrate and find their way to the trunk’s tentacles below.

They planted that tree together forty-two years ago, she says proudly, when they first bought this home. I imagine the young couple, he with a full head of hair and she hoping for the children they would never have, with shovels and a sapling. Forty-two rings of tree trunk later, I imagine that every nook and cranny of the house, every floorboard, every piece of furniture, including the ones we are about to load into the car today, has its own story.

life between the cracks

the little green clovers drop their roots
between those slabs of asphalt we humans pour
on everything, and we yank them out of their
sidewalk shantytowns, manicuring our lawns,
aspiring bourgeoisie disregarding the mundane miracle
we behold everyday:

there is life between the cracks

yearning, that unceasing desire to be, a drive to exist so powerful
one that ignores its constraints, its hostile environment
but simply flowers, shamelessly, unabashedly
glowing in the sun, those little clovers
ignore their fragility, abandon their precarity
and just grow.

to sing like a weed, to dance in the wind on a thin stem
to be so radiant is something we unlearn
and we forget how to be god

braided words

up late, neuroses kicking in, inner insomniac starts to clean
wipe away what's on the walls, the graffiti you've scrawled
over a decade and let the world tattoo itself all over you

removing the ink hurts just as much and the pain reminds you
of the futility of human creativity, blotted out by its successor
scars not quite hidden under those delicate hairs, erect in the cold

i never thought i'd embrace indifference but today i let its taste
linger on my tongue, let the pickles' brine sit and stagnate
and the best part was being surprised by my apathy, pleasantly surprised
about things that no longer concern me, about things like moles
whose borders impossibly change and stay the same after a sunburn

"you've got the same pants to get glad in," that southern woman used to say
i'm in the same pants and maybe i didn't get glad but that tattoo is gone

Day 16: fast poem

time passed. i walked on that grass
seven years ago, still hear the bells
of the chapel ringing, my skin tingling
with anticipation for the first time

when he lifted his glass, rosy-cheeked nine of cups,
his champagne toast was the sweet poison
of romeo and juliet's suicide
and her wild eyes tamed on him, ten of cups,
rainbow overhead, the nectar most only taste once
and lose and miss all their lives

outside the rain pitters and patters
on my uncovered head. the bells toll
their final song and my time has come

Day 12: spring

our home is brimming
with too many books and things
but not people

the way to know God
is to feel the pollen blow
into your nostrils

remind me of love
through stoic silence, to love
to love you, father

shining stars took off
too late at night to worry
like supernovas

Day 11: memories of cuzco

foto por pablo tsukuyama
--

your breath arrested
taking in the central square
wide doe eyes dazzled


the red-cheeked children
their puppets un solcito
fingers make their sales


coca leaves and steam
warming cold thin mountain air
your gut is nervous


silently they climb
with tumplines on their foreheads
your legs fall behind

Day 10: polka dots

(gracias a tim laux por la foto)
--

we saved the lucky charms marshmallows, divided and conquered them
into little enclaves of shapes, like politicians watched their colors ooze into the milk
and marble into mulattos, the cosmic race our parents would never want
their grandchildren to become

she warned me of the biting ants, and oh how they stung
our tender feet until she taught me to decorate the sidewalk
with their innards, to stomp them like crabapples, splattering
remorseless red and brown and death and flies until our parents
taught us it was wrong to kill

she and I, we were always different. we threw tantrums about
those blue plastic chairs, ostracized the wobbly one with the crack
and she wept inconsolably when, on rare occasion, our parents
rewarded me for my quiet with the intact throne and i always felt
a little silly because deep down i always loved the underdog
and knew she was too beautiful for anything less than ken

two little indian girls in white america
dots on their heads, dots on their dresses
their parents lost in this land where love flows
in such foreign, unpredictable ways, which scrapes your knees raw
as you beg for the familiarity you can only find in dressing up
your dollfaced daughters in matching dresses
each one more identical than the last

two little girls retaliated, never to don those dots again,
vowed to be distinct, to perform their difference, and grew up into
a cornbred feminist and a plantation belle who made their parents so proud
and destroyed them in the worst of ways because america made us and ruined us
seduced us and ravaged us, and she and i,
we ended up as clones, fighting for the losing teams,
dotting the same ashes on our foreheads
wearing the same clothes.

Day 9: al cielo

their sweet beginnings, their infertility, his castle of balloons
brought tears to her eyes, and her friend sputtered out a throaty laugh
abrasive, delighted that such silly things evoked such sentiment

and the second time the daughter hid behind her father's shadow
silently choked down the saltwater in the dark

the final time the allusion itself was enough; the tears were already there
just waiting for their cue to spring to life on her cheeks
the arm, placed gently, tentatively around her shoulder, snaked in
a little closer, predicting, anticipating, unsurprised and comforting
when she buried her head in her palms

Day 8: heartbeat poem

boiled vegetables and a few laughs later
you tucked yourself into bed
i listened to the nothingness
the whirring blades of the fan
the creaks and groans of an old building
adjusting to the humidity of the day,
the charged air of the storm

my chest rose and fell and i felt
lucky.

Day 7: water under the bridge

our beginnings and ends were train stations

your broken glasses, the grease of the foodcourt
seeping into our clothes, effacing the familiar,
an unfinished goodbye drowned out by loudspeakers and luggage carts
a harbinger of paths that could be traveled
but not followed

unfinished movies and meadows, apricots in spaghetti,
stacks of library books and calloused power chords later
botanical gardens and broken nails, gins and tonics later

eastbound, the sterile metal doors snapped open and shut
the summer wind hurtled past grand
tears on the pavement cooked and evaporated

and time marched forward.

if I'd capitulated to the west, I'd be under a harvest moon
pondering Ernest Hemingway's run on sentences
poorer, lonelier, fighting without screaming, but dreaming in semicolons
watching the earth tremble in the drink in your hand

Day 6: an attempt at presence

letting the oxygen rush over old feelings,
old friends, old lovers, old enemies,
revisited at peaks of discipline
and abandoned in valleys of preoccupation
and self-deceit

my toes graze the shallow sand,
shoulders submerged, water enveloping every pore,
the shore and the sun promising gritty rewards.

ballerina feet on smooth stones,
a sudden cliff, free falling into
old feelings come friends come lovers
plunging into an abyss
cold but fiery, dark but molten, eternal but ephemeral

what would it be to never wake from this paradox

Day 5: portrait

gray skies, decrepit buildings, brick factories
revamped into lofts. trees bursting into little white blooms.
spring on the familiar sidewalks of six-years-home
etched into the soles of so many shoes
i thought i'd never own, but womanhood molds us
into things contrary to our nature.

red hoodie, cane, bow-legged limp, plastic bag dangling
from a hand wizened beyond its years, teetering on the edge of
gentrification, your skin out of place, your southern love
out of place, your "hello, sister," expected and unexpected at once

my six-years-home, my feels-like-many-years-world taught me
not to show my love, taught me hypocrisy, and the dust of self-loathing
settles as I recognize that quick wish
for complacent uncaring that will never come

hello, brother
my heart is paralyzed for what I am, what I become
you know me not as one of the thousands of
walkersby on fast feet who could carry your bag
but as your own

Day 3: Elegie

here's to the death of a salesman
the end of innocence, the creaking closet doors
the short circuited sins and skeletons
that made me the muttering father
his infidelities
and his disappointed son

here's to the death of
the baby's red fist wrapped tightly around the unsuspecting
index finger of an adult hardened by the world
baffled by love, indiscriminate love
the kind we are trained to forget
the kind we unlearn

here's to the depth of
feeling those words, those rhythms, those songs once evinced
and the dull currents of muscle memory that have replaced them
my lips remember and my heart is stoned
in by what is rote

the world whittled willy loman down
into the toothpick we all become

the difference between being and becoming
the conduit
we call age

his haunting escape, we call redemption

here's to the death of my salesman

Day 2: amanecer

The gloomy days awaken her, a spore in child's pose
the bony fingers of the trees, fractal silhouettes
against a foreboding periwinkle, breathe life
into her one rib at a time. The air, the pollen,
the delicate white wings of magnolia fluttering to the sidewalks
collecting and browning and decaying,
dying as all beautiful things do, fill her nostrils
with the scents of the macabre, the hopeless romance
waiting to trap her in its snares, its carnivorous tendrils

and the puppeteer thinks he is what is making her dance.

Alone

Silence, are you my friend or foe?
Thought the world of you until you showed me we were
never meant to be alone, you and I, together,
like cotton and fire, boys and girls on motorbikes,
mixing butter and yogurt with rice: too dangerous
so explosive that we became taboo
old wives' tales that scare young children
that unripe adolscents scoff at until they too
have grown wrinkled and wag their fingers,
shake their canes at the nonsense we do.

We were meant to be connected, now too connected
and I feel your absence with every breath, every measured step.

You were my muse, you begged me to twirl fingers
in those long curly locks and I could not resist
And how I succumbed to your seduction every time

Now I am a pilgrim and the weight of your death
drags down my shoulders, drips down my spine
like blood and honey for the ants, for the flies

With every step, every measured breath, I carry your wilted corpse
I cannot let go of you, my dear
I cannot

The golden crow

The crows are confetti against this startling sunset
i've watched so many times, but the slow motion flight
of these birds circling like bubbles encircling a straw
carbonated soda in a glass, rushing downwards, spiraling,
what keeps them afloat? Magnetizing, mesmerizing,
wish I had wings

Flocks, herds (searching for words), colonies, clowders
(still searching), how do they read each other's minds
how are they the same mind and my mind can't find its friends
childhood friends, best friends
true friends

murder

There are some words that crawl under your skin and
make your blood itch, make you hyperaware of every heartbeat.
There are some smiles that crawl their way into the crevasses
of your brain, make you hyperaware of your skin.
There are some days you can't help but smile because
you're with your golden crow.

Orion's belt

I'm not always inspired to write poetry anymore because the last year of over-writing and under-reading has stolen my words. Here's some moments worth coming back to.

We're sitting on top of a San Francisco hill under Orion's belt grasping for Blind Melon lyrics with Mickey, waiting for a cab that's never going to come. The capo's come off and his amateur fingers search the frets for the right notes that don't seem to come, either. I want to sing, but I don't know the words, because, I tell him, I have a melody brain, not a lyrics brain.

(This is the guy who rounded up 55 bottles of ibuprofena and throat lozenges for me to appease the not-truly-sick in rural Guatemala, back before customs started checking my suitcases and taxing me for useless placebos for the poor. I haven't seen MM in years, but I watched him learn to speak German from afar. He's that cheerful, amazing, genuinely good, uniquely talented handsome guy that every girl I knew had a crush on, but he's so self-assured, so adventure-loving that he was totally oblivious to it. Much to my chagrin, I didn't recognize him at my good friend's wedding. I blamed his beard, but underneath it all I know my brain has changed. Academia is slowly ruining my social memory functions, my facial perception and retrieval, it's slowly ruining me.)

Xing's melody brain tells his tongue to agree. His camera sits on the sidewalk, lens up, trying to capture those three little holes in the sky with a long exposure. He leaves it out too long and everything turns white. I point my futile phone screen, an eighteen-month addiction I'm trying to kick out of my life unsuccessfully, towards the heavens, and Orion's belt hides in the black.

(Xing I met at a 21st birthday party on Green Street. I recognized his face but again, no name. It evaporated where the turbulent waves of my conscious thought meet the air of drowning in too much. Xing agrees with me that life is quite dull, and this is the most random and exciting thing that's happened to either of us in months. He swipes across his smartphone screen trying to download the uber app. Mickey's eyebrows scrunch up in pity as he realizes how unlivably boring our routines are. He is free and I envy him and don't at the same time.)

I pull up a youtube video of "Lousy Smarch Weather" and we all watch Willie and his kilt catch on fire. I have five bars of AT&T reception up here despite the insistence of the cab company to the contrary. We laugh deep-throated at the genius of the Simpsons and I am thankful that I'm not alone in space.

When was the last time I accepted uncertainty in the midst of familiar strangers?