White Roses

by Lopamudra Basu

Today, I click on Kolkata Gifts Online and
order thirty white roses in a vase for you.
Ma sends me the photo of the roses
and tuberoses and the jasmine garland
all adorning your face today.

Two years ago, in that May of hell’s heat and destruction
there were no garlands. Flower sellers
banished from the city like vermin thought to spread
the plague, dying of thirst on the way, walking hundreds
of miles, sometimes with no shoes

Today, life goes on as usual in New York, New Delhi
and Kolkata – do people even remember that
there was no firewood or earth to bury the dead?
No flights from Minneapolis or Chicago
not even a phone call to hear you in the hospital.

We have said often that we have to think
of it as a natural disaster, an earthquake
or a cyclone like Amphan that tore you away
Except, it was not a forest fire and more
a Chernobyl with many forewarnings.

Two years later, so many names whispered
by the wind, and so many lives like leaves
blown away. So many souls still unmourned
and some like the white roses in the vase
pressed forever in memory’s folds.

Fractured

by Feroza Jussawalla

A purple pensiveness
falls over me, as I
contemplate
fractured bodies
and purple passions.

Who will love me now,
at sixty-six,
with lumpectomied
one and half breasts
and a bulging
inguinal hernia
caused by
moving boxes
after the radical hysterectomy
of cancers past.

None will hold women
broken and fragmented,
afraid to touch
cracked glass,
like shards of crystal glassware,
resulting from being,
dropped in the deliberate abandonment
of betrayals, wrought
by those who should have loved us.

Why do we submit?
to fracturing?

Grief is too painful to contemplate
in purple pensiveness.

Can we be Kintsugi’d?
Using gold, to fill the cracks
of my life, has become
too burdensome—

I will remain, “feroza,”,
scarred with pyrite,
copper turquoise,
they call it in India,
Nishapuri, like my
Persian origins,
Sonoran gold,
in my new desert home,
where sand pours through cracks
like a sieve, unrepairable!

Parrot

(Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, ten years after the end of the war)

by Vivimarie Vanderpoorten

The woman who
lost her son in the war
shows me his framed photograph.
But in his smile
there is no hint of wrists firing
a gun
nor the shadow of hands hurling
grenades
in his clothes, no hint of a striped uniform.
Like the parrot she now keeps caged
and in whose wings she has clipped.
there is no trace
of the possibility of flight.
But as the parrot hops around in his iron cage
you can see the memory of
freedom in his eyes
a home land,
branches and green fields
in his now non-existent wings

Evening of the 4th of July

by Soniah Kamal

She applies lipstick
to her
reflection in
the dark of the
computer monitor
her face
the bones of shadow
play
the color
mute
as she drags a red pencil
she’d brought from the
dollar store clearance bin
to keep her lips
in
though she will
fill them up
like padded bosoms
with a clear plumping serum
that shines
and winks
no matter how
dark the screen
that conceals
the peacock blue and green;
the bruiser kiss
She did not want
she could not stop.

Excerpted with permission from Sing, Slivered Tongue: An Anthology of South Asian Women’s Poetry of Trauma in English, edited by Lopamudra Basu and Feroza Jussawalla, Yoda Press.