jani dekha hobe

that single spot, shunyo, a hole that is filled

to its circumference, I drive and the sun is bigger

than I've ever seen and orange, look directly into it

or, i had to write a poem to go along with the first

one: the TV on mute, I begged for a sound,

recovering from yet another flood, this house never

shook

my grandma died when I was back in

Nashville, heading out for a fire, thinking of

rising into air I try to pour the tears back into

my head again

in Bangla, death is a hit to the face, mara gechhe, to

deprive, thirsty, a pain that is expected yet empty,

and I know, Didai lost someone to drink cha with

"it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot

where the echo is able to give, in its own language,

the reverberation of the work in the alien one," or

mistranslate

it was the day of a sudden freeze, three nights 

that would kill all the buds, cover your flowers,

they said, last frost isn't till April and it is too soon

when my grandma dies, no one here speaks of

blood and i can't tell you because i stopped picking

up when you call crying; it's not about you anymore

everyone here declares life to be theirs only, not a chain,

a whole country that robs us of grief or last rites and a

photo of me by the body, dressed in petals, all in white

a cancer, a stone inside, and a few days of nothing or so quick,

expected until not, and we curse the empty place we inhabit

and wish we were home. what have we done?

Set your feet into the broken stones

and this red earth and pouring rain.

For us there is no exile.

not another poem, but a litany of leaving, or moving,

and you haunt me when there are bigger things, as if I

have grown used to acceptance, a way to lie and forget

these kinds of things call for storm shelters, somewhere to

keep the lights on at night, i recall Baba once telling me

that he would wake and cry in the dark, who had died

then?

she used to bathe me, pour water over my head, and I look

outside and it's the first ray of sun in a while, lighting up

the pink cherry blossom unaware of the cold

we cannot go home now either, and I can't tell you

why we stay like I don't know if I loved you, no

one lives upstairs anymore, what's the point?

there is no end in sight to this, lost paradise, I drive away

again to where I do not have to think, a lamp placed near

her head in Kolkata, from the power outage in Nashville

meanwhile white folks argue with my skin and feel

nothing, shunyo, a different emptiness than ours, full of

clean void, masked, a house of souls, a doorway stopped by

clouds.

jani dekha hobe, I know I will see you, they say when

they don't really know, not as if we come back as something

else or if we feel them in the room still or not at all?

why i give it up again and again, to come to another

swift end, or hold it too long, longer than i want to, and

what is the point, you only pretended like you knew

guddy, the last person to call me that name, goodbye,

what is in the air, they ask, and it must be a vacancy

sign and a lengthy distance, or a road full of

potholes

silent home, we keep ourselves away, tell me, choto didai,

what does it mean? what are you saying? small and lump

forming in back of throat, furniture sucked through the

window

there are no walls between us no longer, the problem is

you have never seen war on this soil, you fight

yourself. you should see what it looks like to really lose

they come here to try again, abhiman, an anger for something

you love, a sense of disappointment but trust, and not your kind,

i never liked your friends, you were cruel to strangers

when my grandma died, it was just like another day,

another time i could not go back while you walk around

and no one tells you that you're wrong, false conjugate

time goes on, does not just end when these things

happen, nothing, nothing ends the world except

the things that do, I just want to speak to her

again

time is grief's first denial, not flying through ash but

lifting mid-song to meet you, shunyo or nothing,

jani dekha hobe, what will I do with all this time?

Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay is the author of the books This Is Our War (Penmanship Press, 2016) and Everything Is Always Leaving (M.C. Sarkar & Sons, 2019), and a poetry album I Don't Know Anyone Here (2020). She was the first Nashville Youth Poet Laureate, finalist for the first National Youth Poet Laureate, and Pushcart Prize nominee. With a Masters' in Migration and Diaspora at SOAS, she is now a Masters' candidate in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Find her work in Poetry Society of America, La Piccioletta Barca, and Cream City Review, among others.