Aarna Tyagi

In French class, I learn about false cognates—how a

body looks from the outside, to the outside. How I

write about the body—fleshed, posthumous. How you

will me to become a medical examiner, how an autopsy

of this dying jasmine gets sampled. After all, even the

unmarried Indian woman is married. And even in this

stanza, the streets of Meerut are synonymous with

chudiya and payals, and smell of more than incense,

and the national anthem is the sound of prophecy in

chai leaves. Behind the mandir, the trees are replaced

with mango groves, and the poet becomes a vessel of

this womb. Let me orient myself; I am always behind

the mandir, a mandir. I am always telling you to taste

the weight of this asphalt and turmeric.

I could write about this brine feeling, but let me tell

you how I abide by my grief: first, stack the strewn

foliage as high as a gun, because all good poems begin

and end in August. Second, salt the wounds and

understand. All saviors skin off pine and oak like

shucking oysters, forgetting where a massacre

occurs—inside or outside the body. Third, remember

only death is this shell’s limit, and on Jones Beach I

take a life: this fire ant who crawls into our picnic

blanket, and while I bury it with sand, I think if only

taking a human life could be so symmetrical, I would

become a cartographer and map these wearied legs.

Still, there is something to be said about this future

which impends dust. Here, I do not tell you about this

future because the ocean does not swim under the

weight of sainthood. In the car back home, I tell you I

will not drown my beliefs. I do not think you hear me.

And when all is said and done, I will still be left

browning out of your volition, because that’s what I'm

told you like: absolved incendiary and nonlinear

translations. For you, baby, come Autumn, I'll write a

gay poem.