birthdays

birthdays
half of the world doesn’t celebrate them
in my birth lottery they were streamers and candles and cake
children screaming with delight in cone-shaped cardboard hats
and thin chin-prickling elastic strings
and then they were yearning for firsts
windows down and wind whooshing by your ears into the sunset
red white and blue stickers and anti-war ballots
and then they were dinner parties and regretted drinks
and then glass stems between the fingers of others but not your own
and then they were nothing
because half of the world doesn't celebrate them and neither should you.

and then they were the plastic oven knob crumbling in your palm,
improvising as homo sapiens with scotch tape in a house of cards.
the daily pleasure of chalky antacids, preferentially pink, and two pillows.
the spanx that cruelly indent your skin, itching
hours after you’ve stripped them off and abandoned them
on the bedroom floor you used to keep vacuumed and clean.

then every day became a birthday
a reminder of age, of youth, moons, eggs drifting away
and with them your heart
afloat in a canoe on the muddy waters of the mississippi
or maybe the styx

a poem for the placeholder

my morning thoughts flow from spinnerets
crafting half-dream-fantasies in which even pain
is preferable to the present

somewhere along the way through the desert
i paid homage to the forebears
of the cactuses and succulents i murdered with water in the midwest
and i lost the meaning of true love

i wandered into this web where i am the trapped human
i always imagined i'd be

the lost hours melted just as salvador painted them
and the sunrise and sunset grew indistinct

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