Poetry

WHAT THIS ELEGY WANTS

It doesn't want a handful of puffed rice
tossed with mustard oil and chopped chilies,  

but wants to understand why a firefly  
flares off then on, wants another throatful  
 
or three of whiskey. This elegy is trying 
hard to understand how we all become
 
corpses, but I'm trying to understand 
permanence, because this elegy wants 
 
to be the streetlamp above me that darkens 
as sudden as a child who, in death, remains 

a child. Somewhere, there is a man meant 
for me, or maybe just to fall asleep beside me.  
 
Across two oceans, there is a world where 
I thought I could live without grief. There,  

I watched a vendor reach with hands of lace 
towards a woman who looked like me. There,  
 
I fingered bolts of satin I never meant to buy. 
There, no one said her name. How to look  

into the abyss without leaning forward? How  
to gather the morning's flustered shadows 
 
into a river? Tonight, I will watch a man I still 
love walk past, hefting another woman's child.  

He doesn't look at me. I won't wonder if I  
wanted him to. This elegy wonders why  
 
it's so hard to say, I always miss you. Wait,  
she might have said. But didn't you want  

your palms to be coated in mustard oil? Did you  
really want to forget the damp scent of my grave? 

SELF-PORTRAIT AS MANGO  

She says, Your English is great! How long have you been in our country?   
I say, Suck on a mango, bitch, since that's all you think I eat anyway. Mangoes 
 
are what margins like me know everything about, right? Doesn't 
a mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys? Isn't a mango  
 
a placeholder in a poem folded with burkas? But this one,  
the one I'm going to slice and serve down her throat, is a mango  
 
that remembers jungles jagged with insects, the river's darker thirst.  
This mango was cut down by a scythe that beheads soldiers, mango  
 
that taunts and suns itself into a hard-palmed fist only a few months  
per year, fattens while blood stains green ponds. Why use a mango  
 
to beat her perplexed? Why not a coconut? Because this "exotic" fruit 
won't be cracked open to reveal whiteness to you. This mango  
 
isn't alien just because of its gold-green bloodline. I know 
I'm worth waiting for. I want to be kneaded for ripeness. Mango:  
 
my own sunset-skinned heart waiting to be held and peeled, mango  
I suck open with teeth. Tappai! This is the only way to eat a mango.  

Tarfia Faizullah is a Bangladeshi-American poet. The chosen poems are  from her most recent collection Registers of Illuminated Villages published in March 2018. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies in the US and other countries of the world.