Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry
Elephants sway in my mother's English—
Pleased to meeting you she says
the multiple suffixes of her mother tongue
affix themselves to her meter: Okay-na!
In Malayalam, vowels sit like an egg
on tongue, ant to aardvark. Her voice vies
against drumkit English,
hums with the rhythm of a mridangam.
In English, the word Malayalam
reads the same from left to right as
right to left—a mirror of contentment.
If only other words were so settled.
My mother worries about the pale clusters
on her last mammogram.
Breast cancer is very popular now.
Common, I say, not popular.
Yes, she says, very popular.
Our other tongue is this silence.
A hush,
a blank face
pressed against the glass.
Issue 3 | Summer 2011
If you knew the day you would die,
who would you tell and why?
There would be the tell
in my twitching eye,
you would wonder what I spoke
to grass and tree, yelled to the sky,
grunted at the night, drowned
in bourbon, beer and rye.
I would tell you, brother,
of the day, but not the time
and then we would return,
you and I, to the beginning—
to the clear shotglass of forgetting.
for Kenneth Farward (1956-2010)