NIshta Mehra
Grief
When the picture of Hanuman fell off the
wall // I should have known,
just as I knew Trump would
win when I pulled Shiv’s first
passport from the mailbox on Election Day.
Truth is always stranger than fiction, since
fiction ought be believable but life
need clear no such bar.
These days a kind of quantum sandwich,
timeline folded // con-cen-trate
our child works to divide
syllables and I try to learn how to
re-compartmentalize my heart.
Years ago, I returned to you
from the forest of bereavement, unable to say
what had changed, other than everything.
Tunneled inside my own heart, feral
girl in bloody furs, packing the
entrance of her cave with
snow.
I wanted to grow into a woman who transformed
her own shape, rather than having it done
to her like each ravaged nymph & dryad read about
in Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology.
Sixth grade: talk about An Education:
how to identify metaphor, hyperbole, but
never what would have been most useful for a classroom full
of girls: how to foil the rescue plot, how to read
between the most important // lines.
How to say, in seven different languages—the reason
my mouth is filthy is that you’ve been feeding me
poison
all along.
“If you swallow that pit, a cherry
tree will grow in your stomach!” Let it,
I used to think, that would shut
the grownups up, if I opened my
mouth and branches came spilling
out
//
The day he was elected, I held weeping female students
in my arms. They could no longer pretend; they wept with
premeditated exhaustion, all of the effort
to come, every lie they would systematically unlearn.
Today it became a Class-C Felony to
provide hormone therapy or blockers to transgender minors
in Alabama; I wept in the faculty workroom after reading
the news. A gay man held me in his arms &
I could feel the terror of recognition
through his skin.
Terror of inheritance.
Terror, this tribe.
Our daughter is a girl because she is,
because she says so. // A-la-bam-a
Some sounds divide so easily on the
tongue.
What I seek is not reassurance but noise, primal response.
Jesse plays “Sinnerman” driving home on Super Tuesday;
how fitting—don’t you know we need you, Lord?
I am discovering that one of the gifts of your raising
is that apocalypse is not at all difficult to
imagine. At night we speak
of passports & plans, what it takes to leave
your life behind while it still works,
while it is not yet
not working, but you fear the day is coming
soon.
If grief is preparation,
then this ground of mine sure is fertile.
Kingdom come,
along with every word I’ve been trained
not to use. The rock may say, I can’t hide you,
but Nina’s voice is
still // a balm.
Human Animal
If things end badly, I want you to know
it’s not as if we weren’t trying to discern the shape
of the shadows in the distance.
When the novelty of novelty wears off,
what is left to sustain us?
If we were teenagers, words on a
screen would constitute a relationship; as it is,
I want bodies in proximity,
words spoken - saliva - breath.
My child tells me of the nature documentary she
watched with her grandmother, about crabs who eat their
fellow crabs once they’ve died, and my initial
thought was “How awful,” but the eight-year-old
found it elegant how, in this scenario, nothing goes to
waste // Alas, we human animals
are not quite so well-designed—or perhaps so well designed as to
have hijacked our own best interests?
How we took things for granted: every, every minute.
Technology will never save us, and neither
will tech bros.
Give me poetry in times of crisis: at my dying father’s
bedside, as the experiment we call America collapses,
when I look across the bed at my sleeping wife and
imagine seeing her for the final
time through the screen of
a phone.
After Brunelleschi distinguished perspective, there was
no going // back. So too
we will find
we cannot measure against what once was,
“how it used to be.”
In Latin, animalis equals having breath::
but humans are the only animal to endanger
themselves by forgetting.