Love Kitchen
Shalini Rana
after dinner
we find ourselves in
the kitchen
a small earthen thing—
the black help
sit somewhere else
eating theirs.
hands clasped politely
we listen to the
white woman who dances
with dirty dishes.
this is her kitchen
her 'love kitchen'
she calls it.
I wonder if she
made love here or
if she meant
the kitchen was a good place
to give advice
on love.
a scrubbed dish catches
the glint of her
sea-soaked eyes, heavy
with splintered desire
a girl would not know.
we wait for something
wise and wistful to come.
in a thick Haitian accent
she tells us:
never
overthink.
Shalini Rana is a poet from Vienna, Virginia. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing and Translation. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. You can find her at shalinirana.com.
Routine (What the Neighbors Don’t See)
The girl goes to where
her mother told her to go
the first time
by the bookshelves
in the sunroom.
She rocks her belly
on a green pilates ball
meant for TV exercises
and focuses on the shifting
rug—dizzy white
patchwork.
The paramedics take
her brother who has
gone blue.
The ambulance wails
its circular ringing—
and once her mother
goes
and the front door
slams
she is always left with
a faint hum
in her seashell ear.
These Trees
Walking side by side we find ourselves in a forest lined with pole-thin trees, vertically rooted in
both sky and earth. Shamrock green foliage dangles down the bark bodies and falls into carpets
that surround the skinny dirt trail we stand on. I think about how the totality of life is evidenced
in these trees. Our lives together just one miniscule segment of theirs.
I stop our walk to look at them, asking you to take a picture of me with these forest fixtures that
look more like Jack’s beanstalks. This walk is the solitude we seek to break down a wall we both
erected last night—piercing words flung at each other that had little to do with trees. I wonder if
these trees shoot upward to be closer to something we can’t see, while we try to look up from our
little height off the ground, like dogs fixed on a treat. I remember what you said last night, but
you don’t. What did I even say? Memory. Words. Stalemate.
You stand several feet behind me, capturing the moment of me and the trees, so I can go home
and remember them on a screen. We are always forgetting. But do these giants that stretch up to
space remember us every time we pause at them? Really my question is, do they remember
better than we do?
In half-light morning
we’ll tangle like forest trees
bark bodies, softened