The Sky, Falling

This is my half of a collaborative chapbook written with Annie Pittman. Also, big thanks to Grandma for lending me her book on the Crescent City train accident.

1.

Forty years ago, the sky was full of trains. Derailed in the middle of Crescent City, the cars skidded and sparked and ignited the propane tanks. After the explosion, parts of the train were found in cornfields, on roofs, inside barns. In one photo, Irma Hill and Ruth Storm stand inside a hollowed-out tank. Their hands clasped in identical poses. The dark car swallowing their white dresses.

And here we are, in a town where everything passes through. So many trains, the geese flying home, love gone south for the winter. In September, you told me you could marry this one. Now, everything's colder. Now, the breaking. Annie, sometimes I think our hearts are lying in the grass, watching the sky blow away. Other times, I think they're wire cages, that they must have caught something. Even these whistles, filling up the sky. Even the debris.

2.

My grandmother told me that after the trains fell, the town closed entirely. No one could drive through, no one could call in or out. Sometimes I think of the townspeople huddled together around the burning barns, the mothers counting their children again and again. The town drawing its curtains around them, tucking them in, saying Stay. No one died in Crescent City. And nobody left anyone behind.

Annie, are trains falling where you are, too? I have found eggshells and bird bones in the yard, but not as yet a wheel, a tie, an engine. I expect they will come any day, and silently, the way snow blankets in the night. I will wake up half-bedded in a train, the way I melted into the blue cars of the Mahabodhi Express. Days I spent curled up in that bunk, drinking chai and watching the light move over the Indian countryside. And did I tell you how I leaned out the open car doors? Annie, there was so much sky it almost hurt.

3.

The stars were still out in Arizona when Ernest A. Grove saw the news of the train wreck on his TV. He had moved away from Crescent City the year before, and he said, Everything was beautiful, but I was still lonesome and homesick. It took the sight of his home on fire for him to tell his wife they were going back to Illinois, back to the town named after the moon.

Sometimes it seems like love is on the opposite side of the world, and Annie, sometimes he is. I remember looking up at the sky from Bihar and not being able to find the constellations. They were there, but I couldn't piece anything together, and my love was too far away to point to the sky, trace the Dipper. Annie, sometimes even a sky full of trains feels more like home than this heartbreak. Sometimes even a town on fire.

4.

The falling trains woke the whole town up. Veterans thought the sound was an airplane crash and remembered their friends falling from the sky. Sgt. Charles Struble watched the trains explode into what looked to him like an atomic bomb. You looked up under that mushroom and felt like the fire might drop down on you, he said. Gaylord Bruniga, a WWII vet, said that the sky was raining propane, that all the leaves in the town were spotted with holes. He held out his burn-dappled hands, said, Look.

Annie, I've never been to war, but I have seen the sky explode. In India, after the villagers built and blew up the giant Ravana statue for the festival, explosives were everywhere. Back-alley firecrackers sold on street corners. Little boys throwing sparklers at our feet. So bright, I stopped needing a flashlight to find my way home. And I thought of you, how you said you wanted to be full of shine. How, when we recited, These, our bodies, possessed by light, we meant every word.

5.

Doris Gocken recalled fireman after fireman showing up at the hospital, burned straight through their gear. She said that after they were discharged, they stood out in the night with no shirts. Bare under the moon, their clothes left in a smoky pile in some ward. I thought someone should have at least given them a blanket, she said. It was June, but after all that fire, any blue night would freeze. She could see them shivering.

Annie, are you keeping warm? It's getting colder here, and there never seems to be enough time to wrap up the way we want. To cocoon. I've seen my love run out into the snow unbundled, the same way he rushed out into the yard when tornado sirens blared. No regard for a cruel sky. Sometimes I worry he will fall asleep looking at the moon, that I will find him frozen over in the morning. Or wandered away. Because sometimes love gets on the southbound train. Sometimes even the train doesn't stay on the tracks. Whole towns go missing.

6.

After the fire died down in Crescent City, the church pews were black with smoke. Though most of downtown was flattened by the blast, the townspeople scrubbed the pews for days. Because when there is nothing left, even the ruin must be made holy. Because, really, what else were they supposed to do with their hands?

You and I have sat in many churches. We have opened our hands to bread, bowed our heads to blessing. I have to believe that if every church burned down, we would still sing something. Surely we could call the sky a steeple. Surely we could say that the moon is a kind of mercy. Because when the trains fall, we're going to have to leave everything we own. I can only hold one thing, and Annie, it's going to be you.

7.

Much of what remained of the town had to be thrown away. One resident wrote, I remember walking down Highway 24 crying as hard as I ever remember crying and thinking that they were taking our town out and dumping it brick by brick, load by load. In the debris: the post office, Horton's Piano Tuning, Jenkin's Barber Shop, Diane's Beauty Shop, the Villiage Inn, nearly thirty homes. My grandmother gave me a book that lists them off, saying, He did not rebuild; the building was not rebuilt; they moved away from town; he did not rebuild.

I remember reading a poem about tsunamis, how the villagers said, We will build new homes away from the sea. Annie, I hope you will never have to move away from the land you love, threatening as the sky may be here in this corn-locked town. When the trains fall, we will return and keep returning. Because I have been on the other side of the world, and I can tell you there is no sky like this one. No better place to rebuilt a heart.

Yield

We were ten miles from the nearest town, a handful of us working twenty-five acres planted smack in the middle of Oregon, where only cheat grass and junipers grow. After a month of farming the high desert, Amar and Noëlie began sleeping in separate beds. When she told him to go back to France, Amar told me, we are no longer one. In July, we had seeded a row of brassicas, and the farmer had told us that our hands would seep into the plants, that we would be given to the land until the vegetables ripened. Amar and I had drawn deep lines in the soil, dropped the seeds in one by one. We were still waiting for the harvest.

When potatoes filled our crates, I thought of Yusef Komunyakaa's poems, his flesh-colored stones along a riverbed, his farmers unable to divide love from hunger. Amar told me he had come to the farm to improve his English, that there were still so many words he didn't know. We knelt in the dirt, harvesting potatoes while he repeated the sounds: ripe, grasshopper, vine. Our dark arms reaching into the holes we dug like children at the beach, excavating at the sight of skin. When Noëlie walked past, Amar called after her in French, pulled off his gloves.

On the farm, we were insatiable. There was food, but no time to eat all that we wanted. Every day, I packed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and headed out into the fields. I wrestled with weeds and thick roots for hours, collapsed into the grass to devour my sorry lunch, then went back to work. For dinner, I coaxed kale and onions and beets from the ground, carried the harvest to my campsite only to find that no armful would satisfy the hunger that had grown in me. When the farmer piled beef on my plate at a communal dinner, I ate it all and went in for seconds. When I walked through the pea field, I grazed. When the sun went down, I slept because there was no light for food and being awake meant I would only get hungrier.

Some days, I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than a vegetable. The carrots coming up purple and crisp orange, ready to be wiped on jeans and bitten into. Rows of feathery fennel, smelling of licorice. How the cabbages seemed to close in on themselves and tighten, then burst open when the sun found them overripe. And how I loved sliding my fingers around the tops of the beets, just under the soil, to feel if they were quite grown. Pulled up and washed, they lay in their baskets like small wet hearts, not quite thumping.

———

In town, when we would place our vegetables into the canvas bags of the shareholders, we would repeat their names: turnips, fava beans, zucchini, chives. The old women would smile at us, browned and dirty as we were, oh and ah at the lettuces we placed on top like whipped cream. They would turn back to their SUVs, their dinner parties, their too-white tennis shoes, and wave goodbye. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I didn’t think they quite deserved those lettuces.

I lived down the road from the farm with a woman named Sweet Medicine. She slept in her trailer, and I slept in my tent, and we both made oatmeal in her shack of a kitchen. Sweet left for two weeks, and I sat alone in that kitchen as NPR reported the drought-induced famine in Somalia. Refugees walking for weeks to get to Kenya, where there was still no food. The skeleton-thin boy with flies on his face. The terrorists preventing aid drops. Food is power, they said.

My grandmother wrote to me from Illinois. She told me it hadn't rained since I left, that the cornfields were drying out, that her lawn was brown. She had grown up on a farm, milked cows each morning until she ran off with the schoolteacher. It wasn't until I worked the land that I understood why she spoke so much of weather. It's dry here too, I wrote.

Amar drove up in the old white truck. I’m lonely, he said. Let’s go to the river. On the banks, I asked him about the scars across his chest where the skin looked grafted on. He turned away, said it was nothing. We watched a dragonfly land on my leg, back away, land on my leg. You don’t have to tell me, I said. But then he did. How he was sixteen and leading protests in Algeria, how they beat him to a pulp and he can’t remember anything except the man who started hitting him. He woke up in a hospital three months later with both legs broken. And when I said how terrible it was, he shrugged: In these places, a lot of people are tortured. A lot of people go hungry.

One afternoon, the pigs burrowed under their fence and started gnawing on rocks outside their pen. Tall drug them back in by their hind legs, his own leg healing from the bronco that bucked him off, that stepped on his shin. Too Tall, they called him at the rodeos. A lanky black man in a stadium of short, solid cowboys. He pulled out his harmonica, told me he wanted to build a tree house above the pigs so he could look down on them. We dumped turnip greens into the pen and watched them fight over the scraps, biting at each other’s ears to protect their hoard.

———

When the bean plants began producing, Amar and I would sit on either side of the row, picking green beans into two big baskets and eating them raw. He would sing “Mambo Italiano,” forgetting all the lyrics but the title and the parts about pizza. Of everything in America, Amar loved pizza and string cheese the most. I made pizza dough from scratch one afternoon, and we took long lunch breaks three days in a row because he kept asking for it and I couldn’t say no. Yours is my favorite pizza, he would say, making eyes at me. Fine, I would say, tearing up kohlrabi greens and basil.

Noëlie taught me how to pick the ripest cabbage, scaling them against her open hand. Head-sized, she said. Some were already too large, split down the middle like a fractured skull, insides just visible. I harvested one and carried it down the road to Sweet’s place, shifting the weight from arm to arm. We could only eat a fourth of it before the heat spoiled the rest.

Dave was a hay farmer turned surfer. He owned the farm, but didn't want to work the land, didn't want to be stuck in the desert. I’ve never seen an American look so emaciated. Skin hung over his chest as he fed the horses in the morning, shirtless and brown. Sometimes I would come across him sleeping in the garden near the house, smelling of pot and beer—his only staples. It always seemed like he would never wake up, that he would fade into the soil there, his ribcage gathering misplaced seeds and sprouting. Or perhaps, like the neighbor’s horse that broke its neck trying to jump the fence, he would be picked clean by the wild animals, skeleton and hair left to bake in the desert sun.

Amar and I were eating string cheese when he announced it would take him a whole month to get over Noëlie. They had been together for a year, and the scientists said this was how it worked. One year in love means one month in misery. He curled up with the farm dogs, holding the cheese away from their mouths. Sometimes I am very sad, he said.

I kept listening to news on the radio—the hospital abandoned in Tripoli, bodies left to rot in a makeshift morgue. We followed a dried trail of blood, the reporter said. And nearby, the Gadhafi forces indiscriminately shooting people at close range. I thought of the bathtub in the backyard that we filled with water and lettuce. How the dead must be washed. How any hospital will let you baptize your child in the sink if she isn’t going to make it. How some days I wanted to climb into the bathtub with the greens, sink into that cool river. In Libya, bodies were left to split open. The doctors ran away in terror.

Some afternoons Noëlie would sit at the kitchen table, eating bread with honey and sketching the human heart. In France, she said, medical students must learn to draw anatomy. We watched her erase the ventricles, retrace them just so. Sometimes she spoke of the bodies she had dissected. Sometimes she spoke of past lovers, how she crawled into their sleeping bags at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, danced with them in Marseilles.

Just above the garden, the horse carcass nestled in the sand. You had to be right on it before you could see it: bones brown with the remnants of flesh; the vertebra snapped, left leg torn off into the weeds; lizards under the jawbone, picking at the broken teeth; its ribcage upturned as if to say, crawl in. People kept asking why we didn’t do something with the body—bury or burn it. We told them we couldn’t go near for days, the predators defensive of their feast. And after all that, why bury a skeleton?

———

In the high desert, there was rain and then there was no weather for weeks. No clouds, no humidity. Just far-away lightning storms we could see over the mountains. The irrigation hoses dripped steadily, roots barely getting wet before the water evaporated. The tops of my ears burned and scabbed off. The spinach field dried, and we spent hours pulling up plants, salvaging anything still green.

After a long drought, it finally rained in Somalia. But the downpour did not save the harvest. It wrecked the makeshift homes in the refugee camps. It washed the bodies left unburied along the road. One doctor said that people were dying because they could not find shelter from the rain. And they were still starving. Many rural families had been relying on corn and sorghum, crops we use in the Midwest to make syrups and feed the cattle. In the New York Times' series "At the Nation's Table," one Kansas family recalled sorghum as tasting like wild honey. They recommended drizzling the syrup on warm biscuits in the morning.

In August, I said goodbye to the farm and began roadtripping back home to Illinois, weaving up into Seattle, then across the big-sky states—Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota. For hours I looked for a crop I recognized, but the land was all ranches and hay farms to feed the horses. Where the food came from was anyone’s guess. I stopped at local diners, ordered burgers and pie.

It wasn't until the middle of South Dakota that the landscape stopped looking like a desert to me. Too much sagebrush, and all those forests gone to ash from recent fires. In Wyoming, every sign was either, Last chance for cheap gas! or, Come visit the rodeo! I stopped to watch some cattle graze on brown grass, barbed wire keeping them to their meal. After eight hundred miles of plains and badlands, I finally veered south into the Midwest. There, I watched thick clouds roll over the cornfields, felt humidity for the first time in months.

In a hotel in Minnesota, I gorged myself on Belgian waffles and bacon while a family read the news to their children: the Libyan rebels had taken over Tripoli. Who won? the son kept repeating. Who won? And then the earthquakes out East. The son looked up at the father, But what if we fall through? And into my coffee I thought, yes. I had driven through Idaho at night, weaving through the Bitterroot Mountains that I knew were there but couldn’t see. Every ledge had seemed like an open mouth, ready to swallow me.

The whole way back, I still ate like a farmer. Pumpkin curry in Portland. African stew with apricots and dates. Udon soup and pork buns in Seattle. Calzones stuffed with fresh ricotta. Roast beef sandwiches. Tempeh and arugula in Missoula, Montana. Salmon and Brie crepes. Crispy chicken. A bacon cheeseburger and fries in Chamberlain, South Dakota. Banana cream pie. More burgers. And in between meals: endless trail mix, bought by the pound.

———

In the New York Times: an article on hunger in rural Kansas. With an eye on efficiency, most Midwestern farmers had stopped growing vegetables, instead focusing on two or three feed crops. When grain prices dropped, many could no longer afford enough store-bought food. One corn and sorghum farmer said that he was working hard, that his children were still hungry. Farming is the only thing I know, he said. I want to raise my kids on a farm, and there's nowhere else for me to go.

Before the uprising, Libya had hopes of expanding its agricultural markets. New irrigation opportunities would allow them to grow wheat, oats, and corn—crops traditionally imported. Under rebel control, food and water supplies became scarce in Tripoli. Although the coast is able to grow crops, the fate of the desert—which comprises ninety percent of the country—remains uncertain.

Along the road, I tried to pick up little gifts for my friends back home. Portland microbrews. Huckleberry tea from Missoula. Tchotchkes from Wall Drug. I thought sometimes of writing them apologies instead for all the vegetables I couldn’t bring back in time. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you eggplant. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you onions. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you collard greens. I’m sorry…

When I made it to Illinois, the corn near my house had grown nearly eight feet tall, but the drought had prematurely dried it. Soon it would be harvested and fed to the livestock. I walked between the rows, listening to the stalks rustle against each other like rough paper, slipping my fingers beneath the husks to feel the smooth kernels, thinking of how I could curl up in the dirt, stay there all night if I wanted to, surrounded by all that feed. I could disappear right into it.

Swallowed: An Introduction

This term, most of my energy has gone toward writing a 25-page critical introduction for my senior portfolio (a.k.a. all of my work from the past three years). It's much too big to post in its entirety, but here are some pieces, to give you a general sense of the thing.

*

You Are Here

Hold your finger on the star. You are here, it says. In the Hall of Ocean Life. In the Museum of Natural History. New York City. You are here. Look up, and see the blue whale replica. You cannot see it all at once; it is too big. You must stretch your neck back and then scan slowly, from right to left, tail to mouth. While you are in the middle, in that vast blue nothing, you might forget what you are looking at. You might forget whale and think plain, prairie, nothing. But only if you are from the Midwest will you think these things.

All around, there are frozen boxes. One of them is dark and holds a sperm whale with a squid forever clinging to its mouth. Men-of-war stinging little fish. Fish suspended in front of backgrounds made to look like water. There is no water in the Hall of Ocean Life. Here, you circumambulate the whale, peering in at all the frozen boxes. Everything seems bigger than it should be, but you’ve never been underwater very long, so you wouldn’t know how big a squid is supposed to be anyway. You hold out your arm to measure it against your body.

There is no way of scaling the blue whale. It is too high up to measure with your arm span. Though the placard tells you it is as long as three school buses, you never took the bus to school. It tells you a human could stand inside the blood vessel, and you think of the current of blood railing against you, how it would be warm and how it would be like standing in a tunnel with no light or in a river with no light. And when you cut yourself out of the whale, you would leave a big red X on the side, right in the middle of that plain. You are here, it would say. And if someone laid a map over the whale, the red X would fall on Illinois and the insides of the whale would spill out over the prairie.

River

In my mind, all rivers are the Mississippi River. I have crossed it infinite times in the backseats of cars, looking down at the muddy water and straining my eyes for the arch in the St. Louis skyline. I know that I found fish on the banks of the lake behind my grandmother’s house and watched my friends prod their fish eyes with sticks, but somehow I conflate all half-formed memories with the Mississippi, so it happens there when I remember it. As if the river is a keeping grounds for everything almost let go, but held onto at the last moment. As if some gracious current keeps spitting memory back at me.

The first poem I wrote that I really loved was set on the banks of the Mississippi. I had just been reading Richard Siken’s Crush, so all the characters in my mind were amorous and violent and tracked mud in the house with their boots. I sent a boy like this and a girl like this down to the riverbanks to fall for each other and rip each other apart. The poem ends with the boy taken by the river and the girl laying down in the thistles, stitches running like train tracks across their bodies.

Girl says to Boy: Darling, I’m not trying to wash you off my legs / in this river, I’m just standing / in the current because I want to be inside / something I can’t see the end of. I have never wanted to see the Gulf of Mexico. I think it would be sad to watch the water that carried steamboats down from Illinois dissipate into the ocean. I prefer St. Louis and the way that the middle holds everything together. There, you cannot imagine that the river will ever begin or end. The river will go on and on in every direction.

Often, the local news has stories of boys playing too close to the river, playing too close to trains. What a river and a train have in common is that both with drag you for miles. And when the authorities come to recover your body, you will have mud in your mouth.

Mother

My mother lives alone in a house that was meant to hold a family. She tells me sometimes she wishes it would burn down, so she wouldn’t be tied down by everything inside it. She used to have stacks of old newspapers all around the house. She didn’t want to throw them away before she read them and cut out the important articles, which were usually obituaries. I would come downstairs and find her surrounded by stacks, asleep with a newspaper crumpled over her face.

As I child, I spent hours in her bedroom, taking inventory of the items on her dresser. The two bottles of perfume—one for Sundays, one rarely used. Crafts I had made for her, bearing my love in unruly handwriting. Small jars that held delicate gold chains and extra buttons. Piles of receipts. Spare change. Newspaper clippings. To this day, my mother sends me newspaper clippings in the mail. Sometimes just for the headline.

In my family, stories repeat themselves. My grandfather had a stroke when my mother was a teenager and my grandmother worked several jobs to keep everyone fed. Everyone says my grandfather was never the same, that his humor had gone out of him. Everyone says that my grandmother was just tired. After my father left us, my mother worked a job she hated for eleven years. We saved up pennies in a piggy bank to go to the drive-in theater. My father started wearing leather jackets. My mother worked and worked and made boxes of mac and cheese. I never realized until later how tired she was.

Every year, my mother took my sister and me on a road trip. First, we went to Colorado, where we went white water rafting and cooked spaghetti on a grill. Later, we drove to New York City, where we couldn’t stop looking up. People from our hometown thought she was crazy to bring two girls into the big bad city. She told them she wanted us to see as much as we could, father or no father.

When my mother was younger, she bought a horse. It was a stubborn, good-for-nothing horse she says. Once, she tells me, he spooked and took off running through an apple orchard with her still clinging to the saddle. Sometimes I think of my mother like this: her face buried in the horse’s mane, and apples falling all around. The brave kind of holding on.

Heart

After years of writing poems to people who were not here, I was exhausted. I wanted, simply, to write about what was here, what was close. While reading Richard Jackson’s Resonance, I admired the way he talked about loving people around the world and how impossible it is to carry all of it. But loving here—now that is something we can all do.

When I was first learning how to meditate, the instructor asked us to pay attention to where our minds wandered most. Most often, I got distracted because I was thinking about the other people in the room, wondering what kind of experience they were having, where their minds were wandering. It took me a long time to get myself to stop this.

Empathy is an art of the imagination, Kwame Dawes said in his Honnold Lecture at Knox. He said that even if we feel distanced from another human being, we must try to imagine what their life is like. We must attempt empathy. I think of the way he moved from place to place, gathering local stories from anyone who would sit down a while with him. I think of the way he valued the here, but also what was other, what he did not know and could only repeat. No matter where he was, the voices of those around him permeated his poems. In Wisteria, these voices are the elderly African American women of South Carolina, whom Dawes interviewed. I am a tornado child, one says. Another: when you see me coming read me.

There are so many stories I know that are not mine. Stories of children with methed-out parents on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Stories from these same children about the goat-man they swear lives in the forest and will come out at night to eat you. I know the stories of my sister, who works as a nurse and sees how we are so fragile. I know stories of the nights my friend sunk so low he tried to kill himself. In India, I sat down in shop after shop, drinking chai with the owner and listening to the always-impossible stories of how he made it in the world. In Springfield, I taught poetry workshops for teenage girls and heard about their every heartbreak. In Chicago, I sat on a lawn with John Rybicki as he told me a story I already knew from reading his book: how his wife Julie had died of cancer and how he thought for sure that love could save us and how he knew now that it breaks us just as much.

Seoul

The first time I left the country without my family, I traveled to Seoul, South Korea with my best friend from high school. It was the first time I felt completely out of place, too-white and unable to understand more than a few words of Korean. I loved being there, taking in the city, but it was exhausting and lonely too. In the mornings, we would eat persimmons still cold from the screened-in porch. I thought of the Li-Young Lee poem “Persimmons”: swelled, heavy as sadness / sweet as love. I wondered if the couple we were staying with loved persimmons the way Lee does. But, of course, I could not ask them. S. was my only link to the world, and I tried not to use her for a translator more than was needed.

I spent many meals staring down at my rice, trying to eat slowly to make up for my silence. I still finished before everyone else. Later, I would hear a brief summary of what had been said at dinner. Sometimes, it was about me. How my skin was so white and beautiful. How I was thin for an American. I never quite understood where these comments came from.

At Namsan Tower, there is a fence covered in padlocks. S. explained to me that it was popular for couples to come to this site and place a lock on the fence to signify their commitment to one another. Then, they throw the key down the mountain. Running my fingers along the locks, I wondered what happens to the couples who break up, if they wish they could get that key back. Perhaps they forget about the lock altogether, and it each year it belongs more and more to the tourists who visit the site than the lovers. A private promise turned public monument. Perhaps this is a gracious surrender.

In Seoul, I wanted to be public property. The longer I stayed, the more I dressed like a Korean. I began wearing my glasses and wrapping my scarf high up on my face. On the subway, I was almost glad when the cars got packed with people, because then no one could stare at me. I remember once being sardined between the doors and a man in a tweed jacket with his back turned against me. I wanted more than anything to tilt my forehead the inch it would take to rest against his shoulder.

On another subway on another day, a man spoke to me in English. He was an old businessman, small in his black suit. He asked me where my home was. I told him America. Illinois. Right in the middle, somewhere near Chicago. He nodded and smiled, and I was never sure if he knew where any of that was. My favorite part of the conversation was that few around us could understand what we were saying. A private moment, just me and my stranger friend.

India

This past fall, I studied abroad in India, where I lived in a small Buddhist monastery in Bodh Gaya. I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go pray on the roof as the sun was rising. You could see the river in the distance, which was dried up and didn’t have a name anyone used. It was simply the riverbed. The place where the holy sadu and his wife lived, where cremations took place. Where the local elephant could be found wandering among the reeds. I remember mornings where I could make out the shapes of people walking in the river. Women cutting bales of reeds. Men building a fire to burn their dead.

Before arriving in India, our program director tried to explain how life would be different there. It will seem like there are no rules, he said, but only because you cannot understand what rules there are. He told us our bodies were like walking oceans, and that Indian life would take too much water and salt out of us. We would need to find ways to keep the sea inside in balance.

There was something about the chaos of the markets and the cities, the feeling of being constantly swallowed up, that made writing a necessity for staying afloat. There, I learned how to write about disaster and how vulnerable it makes us. Through power-outages and weeks of Diwali fireworks, I became acutely aware of light and darkness and how the two rely on each other. I grew accustomed to having my senses overloaded while still being able to pick out the distinct notes of sandalwood.

I lived in India only four months, but have never been so affected by a place. The poems that came shortly afterward were a strange mixture of chaos and cultural transgression. I found myself trying to grapple with the claustrophobia of daily life in India. Fathoming a distance that was never enough. Simultaneously, my instincts were to get closer, to bring the Midwest and India together somehow, to make sense of those long plane rides. I wanted to bring the people of Bodh Gaya to Galesburg. I wanted to repeat their stories again and again, bringing them closer.

Seatbelt

In Dharamsala, India, I spent a month interviewing Tibetan poets living in exile. My friend Tenzin wanted to go home so badly, he illegally crossed the border into Tibet and was beaten and imprisoned. Later, he climbed fourteen stories of scaffolding on a hotel in Mumbai, to unfurl a ‘Free Tibet’ sign when the Chinese president came to India. When asked why he writes poems he says, I write because I have to, because my hands are small and my voice goes hoarse most of the time. Another poet Bhuchung told me, I have to write; it’s a safety belt. I imagined the Himalayas opening up below him, his body suspended over the gulf, held up by words in English, by words in Tibetan.

When I was in Dharamsala I wrote to my mother, a small-town girl from Illinois should not be reading Tibetan poetry on a mountainside in India. When it comes to writing, I would probably say the same thing. A small-town girl from Illinois has no business writing poetry. I know plenty of girls just as smart as me who never left Springfield. They went to community college or got a job or got married. But somehow I ended up here, carried by some current that has always been carrying me. Call it hard work, call it pure dumb luck, call it mercy. But what the Tibetan poets taught me is that you don’t throw any opportunity away. Even if one person reads your poem, it is one more person who knows your story. One more person who opened themselves long enough to hear your voice.

When I teach poetry to teen girls in my hometown, I tell them that no one else could write the poem they are about to write. And that is reason enough to want to write it. Your voice doesn’t sound like anyone else’s voice, I tell them. It’s an excavation, not a magic trick. We aren’t making something out of nothing. We’re making something out of everything inside you.

One day, I laid out paintings of women on a table and asked each girl to pick one and write a poem from it. I was surprised when the girls picked paintings that looked completely unlike them, yet wrote poems that hit a deeper truth about themselves. One girl chose a painting of a geisha and wrote a poem about being more than a surface. Another chose a surrealist painting where a girl is either floating or drowning in red watercolor. This girl wrote about her blood.

I cannot imagine myself not writing. I go through periods where I don’t want to write as much, but I still feel the need. The problem is that I keep living with my eyes open so I keep seeing things and reading things and having things happen to me. I encounter others daily. And all of those things make me want to write. Perhaps it is because I feel the world swallowing me up and writing is the only seatbelt I have, tethering me to little moments, raw bites I can handle.

On and On

Lately, I have been on trains. I have slept on trains, been delayed for hours, drank the bad coffee. In India, I lay feverish on the top bunk for three days, thinking of the mountains I was leaving and thinking of the way my friend said, rock me to sleep, mother train. I drew the blue curtain across my bunk, boxing myself into this body-sized space. Not even body-sized, really: my knees had to be bent. But there I was, alone in my box, surrounded by strangers, all inside this shaky beast. And we were all leaving together. Pushing on and on toward not here.

On some trains, they leave the doors between the cars wide open. My friends and I would stick out heads out of the train to watch the sunset. You don’t realize how much light gets lost inside a train until you dare to stand near the opening. You don’t realize how lost you are, how useless your beginner Hindi is for reading signs flying by at 80 km/hr, and how you must depend on the generosity of others to tell you when to get off. They will push you out from the inside, with your backpacks and your confusion. There, the crowd will push you toward the taxis, and the taxi drivers will push you into their cars, and they will drive on any side of the road to get you to where you are going as fast as they can. When you arrive, you won’t remember how you got there. Your last memory will be of the opening in the side of the train, and you may imagine that the train itself spit you out, perhaps while it was still moving. You will look for bruises on your ribs, where you must have rolled in the dirt. You may even imagine that the train was sent by God to carry you here, and that your body was the prophecy it was holding so long, and that it could not possibly have held you any longer. If so, you will do what any prophecy does: you will wander across the land and you will speak in a voice that is not your own, a voice that comes to you in dreams and visions. Eventually, your memory will slip away from the details, so you will only remember a period of darkness followed by a period of light. You will tell people that a whale swallowed you up, that you lay inside the beast for three days, that it spit you out on land. You will look for a river, to wash the whale blood out of your pockets.