Explaining God
No I don’t think there’s some man
in the sky—no, not that one
they cried out for
as they burned temples
and left sarees streaked red.
I grew up with a hundred Gods,
smuggled like jewels
in my hoodie pocket,
each one crowning a
column of my life:
school, violin lessons,
stomachaches, friends.
They were fewer then,
straighter, holding up
my small house
that I carried
into God’s big one.
Only there could I smell
the coconut oil
on another girl’s slick hair, hear
twelve tongues braiding
through clouds of incense, feel
the heat of a boy’s body
when it was my turn to press
my forehead to the blood-warm tile.
Most days, we went to God
to meet ourselves.
To explain ourselves,
our bodies: the match lit
inside my gut, the years
folded against the toilet,
the scopes, the lesions. God forbid
it was something in our blood,
the riots erupting
from our own bodies.
Most days, God followed us
back home. My mother: slapping
the tile with slippers, spitting
over them to save our lives.
My father: slapping, spitting.
Those nights, I placed two jewels
on their foreheads to make it stop.
Those days, I almost believed
in all of them.
How else to explain
the pull of that boy’s mother
toward mine that Saturday,
how he stood there
passing the prasadam apple
between his hands like a baseball,
how I stood there
staring at the blue of his Nike shorts
against the gold sarees.
And if he reached
for my hand, even once—
tell me
that wouldn’t be God, too.
Tidal
My therapist says everything is just waves. Watch them come and go. Watch the waves of nausea pull me under at 3 A.M. Watch the waves of grief carve the shoreline of my body — for what it was, for what it is becoming. Watch the waves of gratitude for these hands that can pour, this tongue that still knows salt. Watch the waves of pain, the tiny rippling waves of bloody eddies in the bowl. Watch the waves of scent from alcohol-scrubbed skin. Watch the waves pulse on the monitors. Watch the waves of resections and recoupings, their silt haunting inlets I swore I washed clean. Watch this body I thought was a vessel battered by these waves; these waves, water; this water, me, moving through myself. Watch, she says. But I am what needs the watching.
Preeti Talwai writes from the California coast, where she is also a research leader in human-centered technology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, HAD, Sky Island, and Typehouse Magazine, among others, and her fiction is held at U.C. Berkeley's Rare Book Collection. Her chapbook, Chronic, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press.