Winner of the 2022 Contest in Poetry. Read judge Sally Wen Mao’s blurb here.
The Expulsion
For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when [...] we ask, O God, where is our home?
— Derek Walcott
That summer, the locusts coughed red dust.
Packing house, off the sofa’s gridiron,
I wiped limp afternoons, matte spatter of soup
knocked by my childish elbows diving first for the TV remote,
silt of arguments, years Father hollered
to Maradona’s instep kick. Father, who shivered
desert storms to a whisper each time he hummed
for us aaj mausam bara beimann hae
bara beiman hae, aaj mausam.
Father, like the sea, an expatriate
that moves behooved despite
the country’s covert disposals.
Father, who tucked our passports close, a prosthesis.
Father at whom two men cocked
a gun, trawling the house for his work permit.
Their fingers leeched each ventral
dimness with blame. Those nights, I watched him
through the parted doorway, its narcotic eye
blearing the hooded lamps. His shoulders
simmered antennal to hazard.
His cleaved forehead, like the frontier
that threshed us back to this native land,
its grease, & gangly boys who beggar
bagged goldfish that eye me obliquely from plump neon waters.
Most days, as Father idles the hour content
as a windblown shack,
I pendulate, thick with rot. Superfluous,
my reluctant music of leaving, and my lie:
yes, we left, how we hated the weather.
What happens when we snipe truth, its hair-narrow bridge?
What happens when we spill fictions?
Belonging, once terra firma, crumbles to smoke.
I, mongrel. I dog the city’s last engine
droning home. The red eye that blinks blinks
at the billboards’ insomnia. All night,
over huddled rooftops, the koel vibrates, irking
the sleeping hopes of larvae. Supine, shirtless
laborers snore into the puckered moisture. Father
flicks past the news, like the news. How pathetic,
I think, how much like greed,
in these damp enervations, my private alphabet of loss.
*The phrases "hopes of larvae" and damp enervations are from Derek Walcott.