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[ID] => 24993
[post_author] => 40
[post_date] => 2024-05-05 14:10:00
[post_date_gmt] => 2024-05-05 14:10:00
[post_content] =>
Let a man be hungry: he will colonize the moon
For breakfast, and for dinner your motherland too.
Come spring and the green grows out of you — tumor,
Whetstone of your teeth. There is a man in the moon and he
Speaks no language except a mother tongue so dead, its grave
Harvests its own rot. Here is the elegy I could not give you:
The city’s skyline slurred with dreams that will exit
Sideways bullets, moondust for pockets and tongue
Tucked into a ghost story. My man will christen his
Children as birds of the old country and the mangos he tore
Into steeled teeth, pulsing like a heart found beneath
Another. Handfuls of rainwater slip underhand —
Here is the river of my palm and the way it holds nothing,
Palms lines read parallel to escape routes. This hill is more
Bone-dust than body, Earth ripe for shadows with
No men left for eulogy. Let us walk out this sob story
With something to show, family history just sorrow enough
To snake into elegy. Tell me this — your family hatched
A generation of girls with contrition for tongues. How
Do you save a daughter from the immortality of rivers?
Drown her first and drown her well. Dissection is the last
Grace we are afforded in aftermath, her body as limp as an oil
Spill. Somewhere in the world, we are a third act
In the theater of loss. 1948 whittles countryside bare-boned,
Two fraying ropes knotted between each other.
Your nation hung on a white man’s guilt and mouth
Perfect O at sunrise. Oh जवानी,1 how this summer has
Buried you in the breast of a dying God. Our soldiers sing
Nothing but love songs, only uncoupled at an ending mark.
War is an industry in repurposing, so we sing of love down
To a shallow grave. Here is the cluster of my eye
Shelled for disaster. Here is how the moon chases the pupil
Like a stray dog. You split from your mother’s head three streets
Behind a mango grove, spring into woman 384,399 km above.2
जवानी, even our mourning is metric. In time, tradition will
Teach us our own loss. The camera pins us down in black-and-white,
And we carjack immortality from the moon-mouth of the lens.
Thievery is not survival, it is a roadmap to bigger things —
Your mouth caught on the hook of a girl’s, arms snared
On carnation bedspread. The curdle of your brother’s breath
Skimmed like milk and sunk into the half-crescent of a nail.
History is the tripwire upon which we fall an ocean away to
Write odes to a nation of daughters buried in black water.
Love, this is the churchyard in which I buried a missionary’s boy
In the fat of his own tongue. Love, this is the boat that belched out
All foreigners the same. Love, this is the embankment where
I became a catalytic-convertor for ghost songs. Love, this is how to
Break in a new nation: palm lines and life in slow-motion.
Love, my story is in fault lines, which means I do not tell you
My kissing of rivers an ocean apart. Love, you only brave
The world in cable news and so I teach you to hand-stitch ghost
Songs. Love, I confess, some nights I wake to the white of your body
A burial ground. Love, your hands love-make my great-aunt’s death
In exact symmetry. Love, I know you hunger like nothing else and —
Love, in the mornings I make you a breakfast of eggs moon-side-up.
For dinner, we colonize my motherland with a love song.
1A general term for youth, often implied feminine.
2 The metric distance from Moon to Earth. Alternatively, the distance in which a girl becomes a woman, and vice versa.
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[post_modified] => 2024-05-05 14:10:12
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[wpcf-summary-description] => This poem is the first-prize winner of the Reinventing Myth Challenge on Young Poets Network.
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[wpcf-poem-award] => 1st Prize, Reinventing Myth Challenge
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[title] => Ayanna Uppal
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Ayanna is the first-prize winner of the Reinventing Myth challenge on Young Poets Network.
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by Ayanna Uppal
1st Prize, Reinventing Myth Challenge
Cia (Young Poets Network): 
Tracy chebet: 
Sydney: 
Inam: 
