Native

Last time I was under rain,

it was a monsoon, soaking

me and all my laundry hanging

on the roof. Some things follow

a Midwestern girl all her life:

unexpected rain, lousy weathermen,

the instinct to disappear into cornfields.

In India, they name the seasons

by how much water is left

at the end of the day. Here, it is

love with the neighbor boy,

then harvest, the stitching

into small-town life, the ache

of having everywhere to go

and no way to leave. Here,

rain means nothing

except that it’s raining, again.

Because even when we say

tornadoes are a spring disaster,

they keep showing up

all year round. Because

none of our clocks are right,

but we can’t stop looking

at them, and the boy

goes out in the lightning,

will hold out his hands

years after you’ve forgotten

how his palms said stay.

How We Used Our Hands

Always my fingers in the divot

where your bones meet at the temple,

trying to release what’s caught there.

You tell me your mother would love me—

girl who prays on the roof at 4 am, girl

who picks up Buddha statues only to see

how heavy, who knows the local word

for blessing, the way a mother lays hands

on her son before he leaves home.

Here, to reach is to empty your palms,

and to be empty is to stop reaching.

We only touch each other’s foreheads,

raw skin asking to be mapped out.

When it rains, temple bells ring,

and we perch on your balcony all

morning. You read to me, and I ask

again what happened those years

the army had you. Persistent

ache. Behind a desk because

your body was too weak for war.

You admit it. Then turn back

to stories of the Russian tundra,

that expanse of white nothing,

and how you can hold it now

because it’s so far away.

Before Zen

Taylor is sitting next to me in the rickshaw,

touching because there isn’t room not to.

He’s noticed that the man biking us to the temple

isn’t wearing shoes. I’m looking ahead

at the crowd of men up the street, huddled.

When I see what they see, I wish I hadn’t:

a man thrown from his motorbike, gravel

too white for how much blood haloed out,

his body so untwisted I can’t imagine

how anything could wreck so clean.

Loose spirits make them uneasy, men

phoning their brothers to come—

there is no ambulance to call—

and whispering a tractor without brakes.

The closest keep a safe two-foot margin

between their shoes and his almost-dead body

but even from far I can see his shoulders

pushing against the pavement. He needs

to be cradled, to have his wrist touched

at the pulse. But Taylor’s hand reaches

for my scarf, and we follow

the sound of the driver

when he tells us to walk past, to sink

back into the wooden seat and be carried

to the temple in silence and shame.

In Varanasi

On the train back from the oldest city

in India, a man is reading over our shoulders,

mouthing the words like a hungry ghost

chewing on the air. We don’t mind him

being close, not after all these months

of huddling around chai, drinking even the grit

at the bottom of the clay cup, throwing it

out the train window to be consumed

back into the land, as everything here is.

You are dressed in all white, mistaken

for Gandhi all weekend though you look

nothing like him; a man touched your knees

and bowed. I’ve heard this whole city

is a prostration, leaning into the Ganges,

holiest creation water and swallowing-

grounds for all the burning dead.

When we watched the bathers at the ghats,

you wondered how anyone gets clean

washing in all those ashes.

We couldn’t bear to touch the water,

but couldn’t look away as the women

submerged everything they owned

beneath that burying current.

Disappearing in Bihar

Mosquitoes persist. The rooster

never learns three o’clock from five.

Everything we think will stop happening

keeps happening. We weigh ourselves

in the bathroom, converting kilograms

into how much rice and dal and dysentery

have slimed our hips. Ten pounds lost,

and it’s still not time to go home yet.

We’ve made a habit of cutting off our braids

by flashlight, leaving toothbrushes

where dragonflies land on them,

unpacking our jeans only to fold

them up again, to let them be taken

by mold. When we emerge in the hot

morning, when the monastery is all silence,

we only touch our bare necks

and imagine our hair falling in the dirt.

Village children run after us

holding out hands, saying sister, saying

money because it’s the only English

they know. We start to look for each

other’s shoes at the doorway

to find one another. When we forget

our sandals on the roof or lose them

on trains, our bare feet leave

no sign that we are anywhere.

The Translator

Last day in the monastery

and Pema comes up the stairs cooing

and limping as usual, his leg

twisted at the hip from a childhood

disease that almost killed him,

which I imagine means refugee, means

dragging yourself across the Himalayas

and not knowing anyone with limbs intact,

means he doesn’t give me a name for it.

We birdcall back and forth for a while,

one of our common languages, the way

he tells his sons he loves them

by taking them for pizza in Varanasi

and buying them toy helicopters

at the market. Over tea, he tells me

he wants to be a good man.

Then story after story, how

his father slept in the snow

for three months crossing the border

into India, or how the Buddha left home

to starve himself in a cave

before being offered milk rice

and a wide tree to rest under, or how there is

a rock you can press your forehead against

to wish for anything. The day we hike

up the mountain to find it, Pema lets

his whole body linger against the stone,

hands raised above his head, fingers

trembling prayer flags.

Bodh Gaya Boys

Sansa looks like he’s seven,

but leans against the pandal like twenty,

the girls holding out light offerings

to the goddess inside, while he whistles

at his friends raving to Bollywood music

in the street. When the heat becomes too much

for dancing, he slides up next to me

in the restaurant next door, the one

that has a tree growing right through

the silk roof, and I nod my head

at the refrigerator in the corner full of Coke,

tell him to get himself a cold one.

Boys like him always seem to be

in the background, following me all

the way through town some days,

small shadows in dirty blue jeans.

On the darkest night of the year, they throw

poorly-made firecrackers at each other’s feet,

and Sansa is standing outside the pandal,

holding one above his head, leaning towards me

like I’m the little boy daring him to do it,

and when it explodes inches from his face,

he doesn’t even flinch. He lets the light

pour over him like it’s the only way

the gods will ever get a good look.

The Local News

When you come back home,

the mayor has shot himself in the chest.

You remember him standing like a mannequin

in your high school auditorium, the smell

of scuffed wood and old chewing gum.

You've been so far away, no one

thought to tell you. You've been

in a place where shops burn down

every other day, leaving strange words

in the char: famous, Rajesh, Father.

The owners rake under the tin roofs

with their brothers, looking for unsinged

Dalai Lama postcards while tourists

watch from the other side of the street.

When you walked past, you thought

of tornadoes, how they never hit your house,

but you followed the local news: farmers

on the edge of town mending their barns.

Now, the papers are full of this man

who called 911 before turning

the gun against his heart so his family

wouldn't find him in the kitchen

and have to wipe the blood off the tile.

You remember the one ambulance

you saw in India, broke-down

and abandoned near the temple.