Editor's Note
What kind of a strange lovechild is a prose poem? What is it that’s so intriguing about this form? Is it the hybridity? Is it the boxed-in, block-like shape? Is it the ‘paragraph’ and its nature to not be ‘arcane, obtuse, precious, or high-fallutin’ as James Tate once said in The Route as Briefed? What is genre? Or is it as Gertrude Stein said, ‘What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose’.
I do not have all these answers but what I do know is that Shalini Rana’s poems are doing something right. They carry that amphibious ability to narrate a story while keeping the lyrical instinct alive. I find that there are two elements that make these poems truly hybrid. One, is the speaker’s voice: a choice that emphasises the narrative element of this set. Rana’s is a voice which is plainspoken and understated. It reaches our ears without obstruction or ostentation. It is a voice we immediately trust. It is what unifies this set, lending it an air of sameness, and yet, never once do the poems seem to duplicate one another in manner, tone or form. Each poem is its own beast. Each poem’s music, the second element, is different from the other. In fact, if anything, the poems are like variations on the same theme. For instance, in ‘it’s life, and life only’, the patterning of commas builds a softly accelerating and cascading musical effect whereas in ‘First PICU Visit’ an entire phrase repeats itself thrice across the poem, creating a kind of manic music & a persistent awareness of death.
I leave you, then, to read these poems, and mull over the many interesting ways in which they inhabit the marvel that is a prose poem.
— Kunjana Parashar
The Bombay Literary Magazine
it’s life, and life only
mom teaches me at this tender age, sits me down in the upstairs hallway, speaks gravely to my eyes saying brother will die, that death creeps in, for years, like mice in the walls, she says I shouldn’t be afraid, when somebody dies either the family grows closer or it falls apart, ours grows like wisteria without any support, twining and collapse, twining and collapse, a song with nowhere to hang but inside a head, and while mom is teaching, dad wishes a son would bloom in me
First PICU Visit
The girl who knew her brother was dying drove with her grandma to Toys ‘R’ Us, and her grandma told her she could choose a toy, so she picked out a stuffed beige dog with raggedy limbs and a bowtie, and she set its name to Reggie, and the girl who knew her brother was dying requested a bed for Reggie, and so grandma drove them back to the house where she found a brown wicker basket with a blanket tucked inside, and it became a crib, and when they arrived at the hospital where her mother and father and brother already were, the girl who knew her brother was dying skipped past the receptionists’ desk and held Reggie up for all of them to see and said, meet Reggie, my baby! and one of the receptionists gifted her something, though she doesn’t remember what—maybe the blanket, or the basket, or the dog, or a smile.
Portraits in Past Modal
I
A thick-boned boy with our datha’s cleft chin, you would have played high school football with the feather feet of a tennis player. By twenty, you would have had countless girlfriends—or many young women staring at the back of your head during class. If you were with one of these women, you would wait & walk her home, or whatever she might need to feel safe in a moment. Without me or mumma having to tell you.
II
You would know my friends’ brothers & be friends with them too—clicking consoles after school. But you would not know A, the boy who wailed for you in the red wine room.
III
To the delight of our parents, you would be the child that loves tech, majors in computer science. Always learning from datha but disagreeing with his choice of operating system. You would be IT support for mumma.
IV
There would be an older woman you see at the grocery store, like J, the Cameroonian day-nurse who fed you through a tube. You would carry her groceries to the car, & after cracking a dad joke, you would listen to her volcanic laughter, flash your squint-eyed smile.
V
A little too late I would discover the warm embrace of a blank page, wielding it to carry verses about ex-lovers, failed houseplants, a bad trip—different tragedies, because you would still be around.
VI
I would be softer because you would be the one taking shape under datha’s rough edges. Still, I would gift you scars & scratches from our nights of wrestling over nothing.
VII
Mumma & I would have brought home a female dog instead, not needing to fill the void of you. Not needing to remind our little sister that you existed briefly. The lifespan of a Newfoundland.
Boy-God
You are the boy who shares snakes
with his namesake. Yours inside, not around
the neck. Breathing tube slinks down
the trachea. Mumma says Angel Boy,
let’s see that smile, but you, Destroyer
of Our Nerves, stop breath in protest.
We forget you are no saint, but a boy
who survives through plastic snakes.
You are our Shiv, not shivling. We do not
douse you in milk. Instead, precise pump
of oxygen to swell your lungs; our sweet
onslaught of forehead kisses; your coy smile.
~
In your old room, I watch how a stick
of agarbatti burns—ribbons of jasmine
smoke, the ash that falls away on its own—
and think of you as Nataraja, our Divine Dancer
whirling like wild, holding fire
in one of your many hands.
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Vincent van Gogh. Garten des Hospitals in Arles [Garden of the Hospital in Arles]. Oil on canvas. 73.0 cm × 92.0 cm (28.7 in × 36.2 in). Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland.
For selecting an image to go with this particular set of poems, we asked ourselves a simple question: what would a young person — not feeling very well and perhaps a little frightened — like to look upon through their hospital window? Perhaps a bit of colour and sunlight. A little garden with flowers and graced by the calm gentleness of trees. Water and fountains. A slice of the blue sky and the open space to which all living things should have claim. And yes, people walking about, conversing, caring, laughing, yes, simply living that sweet normal irritating life into which you too hope to re-enter, one day….
Author | SHALINI RANA
SHALINI RANA is a poet and translator from the United States, based in the D.C. area. Her work appears in The Aleph Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas.