by
Umang Kalra
Love in the Diaspora
We meet in a room full of micro-aggressions. Make eye
contact
in the middle of a memory. We hold hands in the
shadows
of the homeland, fingers curling in the shape of the
border.
We make love from across the room. We laugh in the
middle
of yellow mustard fields, then open our eyes to iced
coffee
and our eyes reflected in shop windows. Nobody is
watching.
The sun hangs like fruit, the shell of a half-forgotten
indictment.
We kiss in the middle of language. We wake up tangled
in the middle
of a colonial hangover. We carve sonnets into parts of us
that others
won’t see, an overconfident bruise at the very base of
your neck, a
scared lovebite in the corner of a conversation. I meet
your parents
in a daydream. We code switch in the middle of sex. We
meet again
in a sea of white noise. There is nothing ancient enough
to carve
our names into and so we pick the earth & the wind &
the sea.
We hold hands after sunset. We make love again and this
time
our eyes meet. We kiss like fugitives on the run.
I ask forgiveness
from the moon for this decadence for
breathing easy while blood spills
on lands that are mine & not mine
& ours & not our & for all of the lines
we draw in the shape of ribs since birth
we are taught cage means protection means
survival means breathing easy means
if nobody hears a tree fall did it ever really
exist
forgetting
those who planted the seed & prayed
we would water for the names I call the earth
this home is as broken as any, basking
in the brilliance of a power-dizzy god
with more brains that it cares to count, we
are brought to our knees before beauty
before the changing seasons & the slice
of the ocean against land the seed-planters remember
our unspoken promises they watch the fires
we started they watch us pray to nothingness &
wonder
who thought our lungs needed saving
my prayers are selfish things, folded inwards
I ask may I please forget I am real for a moment
longer
& I return year after year begging forgiveness
for the weaknesses in me I call brilliance I ask
the earth for understanding, the moon for silence
calling myself names reserved for kings, I ask
forgiveness for breathing easy in the shadow
of my luminescence, my shattering
magnificence,
I am a thief, stealing mercy from the heavens
breaking
my bones in guilt over the earth building altars to my
hubris
Umang Kalra is an Indian poet studying History in Edinburgh. She is the Poetry Editor at the Brown Orient, a literary journal platform for women and LGBTQ+ people from mainland and diasporic South, Southeast, Central, and Southwest Asia. Her work has previously appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cotton Xenomorph,Vagabond City, Fallow Media, and others. She tweets @umangkalra__ and writes at theanatomyletter.tumblr.com.
