My name is Sunditi Desai and I am dead. I did not know it, not at first, when I woke to the natural up and down rhythm of the boat on the river. I am the daughter and grand-daughter of fishermen; the neighbor, wife and mother of fishermen. Waking up out here alone didn’t seem so strange to me. It was only when I lifted myself up on the red edged corners of the canoe, and the fancy jewelry we saved for death and marriages bobbed against my earlobes and wrists, did I begin to know the truth of it. I’m 86 years old. I wasn’t getting married.
I rubbed my thumb against the gold bracelets that wrapped around my arms; followed the silver embroidery of a bright white sari I’d never owned; traced the dark spray of moles on the skin of my forearm.…
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We like to think we’re built of major, minor, and trace elements, which use DNA as the recipe to mix and combine in patterns to make blood, bones, organs, skin,and such. Wrong. We are made of words. Words are in us from birth. As we grow, words take on meanings, so they can be combined and recombined indifferent patterns. Phrases and later sentences lock together, shaping how we move through our lives, more as architecture than language. Some of our words look inward and some outward, and we need a full complement of each. If some inward words are missing, we are incomplete. If some outward words are missing, there are gaps in our connections with others and these gaps are the distances between us.…
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The way that a single man carries the human race is a mystery. Some men carry it so closely that they have a place to put the catastrophes of human behavior when they come their way. They have a place for them in their body and on their face.
When the newspaper told Kamal Abdi in the morning of Nicaraguans killed or Salvadorans killed or Palestinians killed, he would make a place for them inside him. It was what he had always done. You started with the premise that the space you could make for them was infinite. Until human beings got it right, that was what it had to be.
On Saturday mornings, something very bright and alive would happen. On those days, he would not have to make a place for them inside him because he would have breakfast with his son.…
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It is more than a shadow over my face.
It is my own skull rising out of my skin
in slow motion;
the years piled up in the yard like slaughtered wolves.
Sometimes I catch my death
in the corner of my left eye
and trap it behind a contact lens.
Other times it will not be contained.
Some days it insists on itself
to anyone who will pay attention.
In the last room, I want it to be you.
Bring me a sprig of pussywillow
and all you ever were, in manuscript form.
I will be the old woman
clasping the limp word-corpse of some dead poet
tight to my chest, the smoke of my last burnt offering
rising from my mouth.
…
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Mommy, why is that man crying? A blonde girl about six-years-old in pigtails asks. It takes me a moment to realize that she’s talking about me.
I slide my sunglasses from my bald head to my nose. Never take them off. Never let anyone see my eyes. Force a smile at the girl. She stops kicking her legs, lets them dangle from the Wal-Mart shopping cart seat and stares at me. She’s probably looking at herself in the mirrored lenses, but I can’t help but think that she knows that I’ve killed girls like her in other countries.
Don’t look at her. Stare at the check-out candy. Chunky Bars? They still make Chunky Bars?
That’s right, Mommy. Shield your baby girl. Get her as far away as you can from the monster in aisle six.…
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The year 2010. He’s nothing I want to befriend, and I’m dripping in exhaustion, unable to rub two thoughts together. Spaced three feet apart, a gulf between us. A recumbent child, a dwarf, a lifetime could fill the hole between us on the bench. He says, “You missed a belt loop. And your pants are unzipped.”
I’ve dodged across the US all day, flown from Oklahoma to get to Texas to find Los Angeles to arrive in Albuquerque, all in pursuit of an additional forty-five dollars of savings. Now, in the late afternoon, I wait for a magic coach to carry me miles out to my car. I wait on a bench with a morose, humped-over man in black pants and a white shirt. With epaulettes and patches, a little American flag on his shoulder, a phone but no gun. …
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The heart was in bad shape when you gave it to me: a crumbly autumn leaf of a piece of paper with two gentle humps meeting neatly beneath the top. I don’t quite remember the lyrics to whichever pop song you painted on it, around the edges, spiraling into the middle. What I do remember is that those words, not your words, were dark and smudged like bruises.
Your heart had its fair share, too. You confided in me: rain smacking off my windshield, texts from our parents saying that the power’s out, and we should come home. But we didn’t leave. We lay in my tiny car, rubbing our noses together and wrapping our tongues around the abstract idea of heartbreak. You mentioned Ben, the brooding skater guy who left his heart in another zip code.…
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