NAISHA RANDHAR

rage

someday, I’ll be alone in my apartment, wishing for my mom
to cry with. I’ll ask her are we crying over
the same thing? I’ll beg why couldn’t we have done this
while you were alive? she’s been dead more lately.
in my dreams I tell my dad I’m your fucking
daughter. mom mixes brown sugar and ghee into a bowl,
food symptoms of her best loving. I am everything
like her: for example, my nose gets red when I cry.
her temper, like a flamingo, pink and inflamed.
her laugh dropping like a little dark pebble. her sadness,
which I also prefer to being alone. always this space, a
frozen sea, shadow, stretch of legs. my desire to be held.
still now, in this empty bed, I would give anything
for a touch of her pain, its familiar wailing. 

Winter, Again

I’m trying to fathom my sadness. I steep my tea and watch a fly swim in a pool
of vanilla ice cream. More bodies in the streets, too many to turn over, their faces bowls
of gravity. Dismembered and howling. I was reminded to let it go by the latest
joy expert. In the snow field, I’m still learning to grieve and still trapped in this museum
of weather. So curiously in love with what I do not yet have, and how are
you not yet destroyed? In the cold, I remember everything, and everything stings.
I was expected to go to college and carry my weights. I was raised to be a doctor,
and I can’t fix anything. My father said look, the poor people, the poor dead people.
My mother said you are as normal as anyone could be. I was raised to marry a man,
and my only allowed pursuit was a career. Grandkids, my mother would say with a soft smile.
I pursue this sadness. I cut tomatoes in my small kitchen and read to bawl. I suffer
through more patient wars. I am here: no man, no grandkids, this fly drunk on ice cream.

Girl

After Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”

Look at yourself; in the shop window; with your skirt blooming behind you; admit you really wanted an amber bicycle for the summer; don’t inherit your mother’s suffering; don’t wash your father’s laundry; don’t stop singing songs in the bathtub; don’t worry if the neighbors are listening; don’t memorize a lover’s hand until you are sure; but not too sure; you love; you love; don’t take anyone’s advice without proof; don’t wash anyone’s laundry, really; don’t look twice in the street before kissing your lover; or buying a pink Get Well Soon card; or making cocoa and laying blankets on the couch; can I make you tomato soup and toast? can we sit here?; or saying her instead of they; yes, change your vocabulary; no, don’t forgive your mother for her suffering; don’t forget the blueness of the mountains when you were seven climbing trees; years later it will remind you of a lover’s hand; the roughness; or the taste of the sap; the sting in your knees after falling; like a bird; you must pretend; you are not tired.

Naisha is a published author of the novel “Roses of Arma” and the Dallas Youth Poet Laureate. In this role, she attends various panels, conferences, and has performed at events such as the Dallas Lit Fest, hosted at SMU. Her poetry is featured in Thanksgiving Square in Dallas for Mag Gabbert’s Thanks-Giving Foundation project, “The Virtues”. She has been recognized nationally by the National High School Poetry Competition and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.