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