Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

SWATI RANA

SWATI RANA Born in India, Swati Rana immigrated to Canada at the age of ten, before moving to the United States and attending Dartmouth College. Rana’s poems have appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Salt, Main Street, Word, and Uncommon Threads, and she is a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Sidney Cox Memorial Prize. She is currently working on her first collection of poems, covering workaday life and subsistence, as well as a series of short stories about the migrations of her extended family across several continents. Rana lives in Berkeley, where she is a graduate student in the English Department at the University of California, completing a dissertation on early twentieth-century immigrant literature. I am part Hyderabadi, Punjabi, and Haryanvi and take to the forests of Vermont and the Northern California coast. Stopping for the Northern Lights Remnant light, struggling against high-walled sky to slip around and join the twilight retreat. I-90’s screaming past, but I’ve stopped to watch the silent mouthing green, its horizoned haunt. At my back 214 night rises on each mountain, spills to lesser hills in shades of gray, summons a final farmland sweep, congregating in a black barn behind me. A girl could hang herself from such a night —the thought folds into my sleep and she appears, as sunrise swinging from rafters. Her interior life is far or near as I imagine. But her deadpan eyes are always open, green and nightly. To Reveal I lay where the sun wasn’t in the mouth of your deep room as you examined, with inconstant hands, your first patient. I wore white bloomers then, SWATI RANA 215 my hair always in pigtails curled tightly, dissonant with this moment of undoing. My breath evolved to the drone of the ceiling fan, to the slap of lizards dropping, scurrying to dark spaces, while you listened with my Fisher Price stethoscope bold and yellow like the steady finger of light that moved across the floor reaching and uncovering . . . Show me yours and I’ll show you mine, but I, too nervous even to look, saw only where my mother had sewn my name to my white bloomers, blooming in red— saying all the guilt she gave me. 216 SWATI RANA ...