12-17-2015
Vandana Khanna
My Mother at JFK
Tries to pick up the cadence
of the immigration officer's
intonations, blurry and abstract--
quick turns of the tongue
stroke the air with all the bustle
and weariness of this new world:
its thick accents and alleyways,
gypsy cabs and jazz.
She learned English watching
Audrey Hepburn movies where
every sigh sounded like music.
Clearly annunciated vowels
and consonants stood stiff
as sugar cane, as the British
nuns who taught her, who
rapped their speech across
her knuckles. At night, she
wants to wrap the cough
and sputter of scooters,
the low moan of oxen
around her like her mother's
shawl, but she can't hold back
the sheer demand of horns
and sirens, of America
seeping through her mind,
until her body throbs
and pulses with its rhythm
and rhyme. It makes her ears
ache, makes her forget a mantra
about new rivers and old gods.
The Blessed
Back when we belonged
only to ourselves
but didn't know it,
when dust coiled
around our ankles
with every step
we took away from
the front door, when
our breath still smelled
of raw milk, our ears hurt
with stories slipped
through the thin seam
of our mothers' mouths,
tales that could char
tongues to a black soot.
Our mothers who were
too scared to swim or curse
or drive, bent us with their worry:
half a world away, brides
were lit like torches,
thrown from kitchen
windows for their dowries--
kerosene-soaked saris
flared like a brilliant sore
in the bleached sky.
Their words bit away at us
with their tea-stained teeth.
Even in our innocent,
American kitchens
the steel-tipped stove
stood bright, ominous--
made us shudder
like a broken wing.
We were blessed--
our fate consecrated
by an unlit match,
our minds, a pot boiling over
with the salt and steam
of all we couldn't imagine.
Madame Destiny
At eighteen, we drove out
of Philly, shook free
of creased skirts, legal pads.
Charmed by quarter slots,
ten dollar palm readings,
sand-grit tonguing the burnt
cove of our ears. Our ankles
salted and skimmed by sea foam.
Inside, Madame Destiny
murmured into our hands,
chanting our bad luck away:
unaligned stars and ex-boyfriends,
phantom mothers-in-law.
The only boys we met,
with crew cuts
and wrong-colored eyes
thought us tourists
and we played along
as they leapt from one
hotel balcony to the next, flexing.
Their mouths traced
the lines of shadow
and light on our skin.
We forgot our destinies
the matchmaker's list
of names, a humid curse
breathed into our ears, hard
as the ocean's slap at our backs.
Against all prophecies
and promises, our crooked
love lines frayed at the ends
like jeans. Our hope
turned stale as a Hindi
pop song-gone
in the flick and bruise
of a blue bar light.
-from Afternoon Masala
BIO: Born in New Delhi, India and raised in Falls Church, Virginia, Vandana Khanna earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia and her MFA from Indiana University, where she was the recipient of the Yellen Fellowship in poetry. Her first collection, Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize and her second collection, Afternoon Masala, was the co-winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. Vandana’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as Crazyhorse, Callaloo, The Missouri Review, 32 Poems and The Indiana Review, as well as the anthologies Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation and Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. She has taught English and Creative Writing at colleges and universities across the country including Indiana University, Pitzer College and the University of Southern California.
