Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

AMARNATH RAVVA

AMARNATH RAVVA Amarnath Ravva received an MFA in writing and integrated media from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. He has performed (as part of the ambient improvisational ensemble Ambient Force 3000) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Machine Project, and Betalevel. He has also exhibited work at Telic, the Acorn Gallery, Pond, and the Keith and Janet Kellogg University Art Gallery. His work has appeared in journals such as nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, Encyclopedia (vol. 2), LA-Lit, and Drunken Boat. I am a Telugu Californian who was born in upstate New York and lived in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, as a young child. I Am Burning a Pig in My Room, Apollinaire You speak of the heavenly bee Arcture, resting fat in bed with gauze above your brows that covers the contingent wound from the war you received the shell that split your head while reading before meeting you I was young with my father 69 on a country ranch on a swing they were hunting the pig for lunch, heard horny rusted snorts cornered across the field the spit turned above the cedar fire when he pointed, not at my falling shin but the bee I swung into, who killed himself and clung still in my shin later, the pig died roasting it was heavenly like you are when read but you’re the stiff in the photo I meet daily, the reading and shelving of what’s left of you gets to my baby head 70 AMARNATH RAVVA you did not ask to die of the wound and the Spanish Grippe that seized you soon after, laying you prostrate in bed for a still life the Grippe ran through you, burning and boiling your water out past the skin gripping and tossing your gauze ridden body in the waiting grass now night comes and hours ring where accidents have left you sheaved, in my hands. Bear Scat Flat I never knew I’d come to Bear Scat Flat but there it was around cabins with walls AMARNATH RAVVA 71 as thin as a toy house teeming with life, mosquitoes borrowing your own for the night and in their drone the miner’s dead horsedredger , crusher, ore skip rusts light on the ground there are machines in the forest and a bear on the floor and my hand slips and snaps my face we move faster to catch up with what’s endless around us stars, like the buzz, burning on my neck and sipping beer till Liz picks it up and says, this is where the bullet went in the bear: hung like a dog by hands she cleaned my furry wound with, 72 AMARNATH RAVVA “I am the mouth she ate with flesh years ago, I am the young throat she swallows” When I was young trains cast light across the straits as they passed the kids of Port Costa looking back at the lights of Benicia like now when I look at Liz over the table the bear the rug between us, it’s not the first time I’ve seen a dead bear the last was draped over the body of a man who sweat animation into the bear tied to his back as he danced as we watched his eyes AMARNATH RAVVA 73 showing white showing red veins crossing as he snorts in the circle we made in dance for him whose heart beat fast as we turned, blue mayflies in June brushing him with wormwood. the spectacle of a few trees in spring, off the 5. I. The birds travel miles to mate here with us at the rest stop, changing the trees into a carnal city they drop adulterous waters from, bathe the bobbing lufkins in the fields with their homage 74 AMARNATH RAVVA It’s spring and they feel oil underground like heat that turns them on they should look at the sign stuck in the lawn facing the dry hills to the south like the ones around a lake near my childhood home, it says there are rattlesnakes in the area active at night in the summer when I was younger, before the hills were...