BY RASHI ROHATGI
Editor’s Note: Our poetry piece by Rashi Rohatgi follows a speaker at immigration wrestling with, in the writer’s words, “the ways in which the pandemic undercovers and exploits other fractures in migrant lives.” The breathless enjambment used in this work create alternating moments of thoughts that unfurl, break, and continue unfurling, paralleling the speaker’s frenzied mindset, and ours, as displaced people in an time of quarantine.
Header Image: “No Woman is an Island” by Sherry San Miguel | Oil painting, 2019-2020.
At immigration I apologise for my northern accent.
How dare I try to bring my Øs home through a pan-
demic. She stares at me through the same glass
as always. It is true, I say. All of it. That once, I
stole a library book – slipped it into a bag
that had never held a purloined grocery sweet
or unearned grade. Lode-shedding I cannot translate.
Also I cheated on the boy who drove his knuckles
into and past the thin cabin wall: too cliché. “I’m sorry,
I love you, I’m sorry, I love you…” Just when I’d try
to close my eyes he’d catch my gaze. “You know
I’d never do that to you, right?” Let through I make extravagant
fruit purchases on our credit card, scrape off mold,
pour rancid melon juice down the drain of a silenced
fountain. At home, you leave a citation in your pocket,
and I wash it bare, place the curled yellow scrap atop folded
jeans and sit quietly on your office floor to see you punt
the folded pile into the window. You beat the
washer-dryer right where it hurts. You pour yourself
a glass of something red – do I want one? Maybe
just half – and salt the pasta water, at ease. My haunches
flex but there is no need to crouch. You do not want me
but rightways up. How dare those monsters in parliament
suggest medics steal masks? This is a disgrace and you
want me to say so. I say so. I agree but my words don’t mean it. How
small my heart is, how much better would you take
an admission: we are bred to feel anger, and then pull all
that we have close and run out into the night and spin,
spot using your silvery skin as anchor. Behind glass
you suggest I educate myself and I agree, I agree.
When you get angry, it ends. No new cases today,
you say, unless you’ve brought some and it’s not like you
have plans to stroll about licking groceries.
At the airport I let a strange boy embrace my son
like a brother. His mother finds me instantly
at six paces, slips herself between her husband and
our brown sons, breathes. I think. Our son:
I have brought him back to you. Your anger
has long since faded. You know mine has, too.
—
About the Author:
Rashi Rohatgi’s work has appeared in, amongst other venues, The Toast, Lunar Poetry, and Electric Literature. She has served as a reader for The Rumpus, an intern for Ayesha Pande Literary, Reviews Editor for Africa in Words, and Fiction Editor for Boston Accent Lit, where she convened the Accent Prize. She is a former AWP and Binders mentee and a Bread Loaf, VONA, and Tin House alumna.
Images provided by author or used under creative commons license.
