Nadia Misir

you will forget how to speak. fuh-get how tuh speak
like we. how to switch b e t w e e n
we patwa and the English we receive from The Queen. when your grandfather dies you will pick three—no, tree—purple bruises from the fig tree in his backyard in queens. he recited shakespeare, sang country-western songs. you try desperately to pull his english back to shore. his IV line disappears in your dreams that night, the bruises turn into figs you both eat. bodies bear the fruit of the soul’s pains and yours is an eternal hunger, yours is a meh-belly-cyan-full-fas’-enough kind of hunger. we english

If what I write becomes an extension of what I grieve, how can I also make room for joy? Last spring, I made a daily inventory of three things: one thing that brought me joy, something I mourned and what the Q37 smelled like. Grief was still the dominant filter that colored my days, so I tried something that I thought would produce a more tangible result. I planted tulips.

If theory is a schematic, is poetry also a kind of theory? Too often I mistake the ordinary for sublime.

They call it first oil. The date and time of birth are recorded. December 20, 2019, 9:34pm. Sagittarius sun, Libra moon, Leo rising. The headline: “‘It meant so much to me’ …EBD youth says on being the first to test Guyana’s oil.” The misguided optimism is not an exception despite the fact that first oil came without “necessary systems like a local content policy or a petroleum commission.” “Bittersweet,” the Guyana Times International calls it. We record the dates of things like disasters. December 20, 2019 is no different.

I’m not athletic, but I developed a love for a new sport in Cold Spring: postcard hunting. I purchased four—the oldest postmarked in 1937 and the youngest in 1985—for a dollar each. My favorite lines: it is impossible to move a big, delicate plant in a car and Richard, it is lonely at this lake.

Atlantic City is where a sunny summer storefront came to die: WOW, HOLY CREPE!! OMELETTE CREPES SAVORY CREPES SWEET CREPES DRINKS FRUITS. It is a storefront that is sure of itself and its use of excited punctuation. I want to use two exclamation points, too. A red FOR RENT sign greeted us at the window. Abandoned storefronts make me think of abandoned words and letters, which makes me think of a discrepancy between what is written and what is real, between what was and what could have been.

I have had to dislocate my faith, and how I imagined I was allowed to love and lust from patriarchal spaces like the mandirs I grew up attending on Sunday mornings—spaces where worshippers prayed with carnations and other flowers. I have grappled with these questions while watching television shows like Sex and the City—a show that I knew even as a high school student was problematic, was not about my New York, that did not reflect what I, or the women around me, looked like, or sounded like, but that still sparked moments of alternative imaginings of how and who I could love.

I think diaspora is a mosquito that bites at your skin until it swells red, until you can’t help but scratch it raw. If clarity is a mosquito bite, then let the chemicals each mosquito plants in my blood be mixed with the names of the ancestors I seek. Let my skin swell red with their names, their love stories, their joys. Let me summon the spirits of the mosquito ancestors that bit at the flesh of my ancestors. My mother recognizes the bursts and shocks of green, the fruits and flowers, the greedy rain clouds that eat up the entire landscape of the country I saw when I was barely a year old.

Since the end of slavery and indenture in the country, Guyana’s history has become one of fraudulent elections and ethnic divide. But there is also a Guyana that is covered in rivers, creeks, and trenches, a Guyana that took up extra room in the kitchen when you were a child watching your grandmother clap hot roti over the sink, spinning stories about a place that was an empty memory for the first twenty-five years of your life.