Thursday, May 17, 2018

Projections

Today: Big A comes home form a week of conferencing.

Next Week: At comes home from college for the summer

Next Month: My mom comes for the rest of the summer.

Basically, I love summer.

_

Friday, May 04, 2018

Carrying on

I didn't know how I would begin to carry on. I was doing every thing I needed to at work: completing courses, attending a dozen end-of-the year award ceremonies and banquets, grading, supporting and loving my students, writing letters of recommendation... but I'd come home and collapse in the library, curling up on the chair and falling asleep until everyone had gone to bed and sitting in silence between 11 pm and 4 am sometimes doing work, sometimes just going down the rabbit hole of rape.

But graduation happened and At's 19th birthday happened and suddenly summer seems to have happened. And I'm going to try and retrospectively recreate some days from memory and photographs. And carry on by fighting in all the places, spaces, and conversations I can.

_

Wednesday, May 02, 2018

Monday, April 30, 2018

Didn't Win Any Awards...



But my regalia always makes it into so many official photographs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



_
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Sunday, April 29, 2018

(Fashion) Rampage

We had the theater to ourselves
unashamedly talking nonsense
and admiring The Rock

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Asifa 2


I could be asleep
but I keep hearing her
hollow with hunger
elegiac from pain

there is the smiling face
there is the stilled corpse
in the same (only?) dress
her silence is my voice

with all its broken bones
the secret, broken seams
dreaming of home, return-
ing to an unbroken body

She knows more than I do
and yet like any child asks
why why why why
why why why why

-

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Asifa 1



Asifa died in January
it was April when I learned
it is always already too late

We walk alone to the river
to the horse, to our homes
our thoughts catching

on branches of doubt
of light, rupture our
cruel, fool-ish world

Friday, April 13, 2018

Justice for Asifa








I feel a murderous rage coming on. I can't get the story of this child's face out of my head.

My dad was fond of the radical Tamizh poet Bharathiyaar who claimed, Thani oruvanukku unavillai enil jagathinai azhithiduvom” (If even just one person does not have sustenance, let's burn down the whole world). 

And that's how I'm feeling today. No one deserves to be happy, no one deserves to live. Let's just nuke the planet and be done with this. 

_

never a dull moment

I had looked forward to today--on the family calendar as a college orientation day for Nu. But kids and families were separated early in the...