Hold Still

In “the night I fucked the border patrol agent,” Shivanee Ramlochan, describes the agent’s orgasm as a "small bomb,” a violent event designed to immobilize him—which it does. After having sex with him, the speaker manages to dart into forbidden territory, “his mother’s crucifix” in hand.

Ramlochan mixes Hindu with Christian symbols, border-crossing in her descriptions: the agent’s dogs are “quick as Krishna’s gopis,” or devoted cowherds—but their saliva beads like “rosaries,” and their jaws “open like warm ovens for bread and fish.” Later, the speaker kills a dog by sinking the “gold christ into her eye.” Rendering “Christ” in lower case, Ramlochan emphasizes the situation’s utter lack of sanctity. When the dogs attack, the speaker addresses them in “their father’s language”: "stay calm hold still / hold still stay there / … / I said stay.” Their “father,” the agent, presumably uses these words not just on dogs, but also on the migrants on whom he unleashes the animals. 

 

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Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s “Cluster Fig” stretches down the page, as long and lean as the tree it describes. The poet fills his brief lines with metaphors, comparing the tree to a giant, a church, and a beanstalk. Additionally, it’s an apartment building, “a high-rise / for birds” that are “heard / in its windows, / singing, screeching, / cawing, as if newly / in love, survivors of / the human disaster.”

Which disaster would that be? The tree stands near a bush “abloom with polybags”: rather than flowers, plastic bags—scourge of environmentalists—decorate the plant. Yet even as he indicts human wastefulness, Mehrotra uses a human simile, “as if newly in love,” to describe the happy birds. That personification at once enriches the poem and “pollutes” the image: just as people load bushes with our plastic bags, we load nature with references to ourselves.

 

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In his sonnet about Epeli Hau‘ofa, Sudesh Mishra links the influential anthropologist with nature. Hau‘ofa—who lived in Fiji, taught at the University of the South Pacific, and died in 2009—chats with “clouds and trees or a bee.” His beard is a “hive,” and “his brow has billows / For he thinks like the sea.”

He acts like the sea, too, moving “up and down” both physically and emotionally—an echo of rising and falling waves. That comparison also associates him with poetry, and especially with iambic lines like this one: “And just in time the sea comes rolling by.” Mishra’s emphasis on the ocean reflects Hau‘ofa’s work, which argued that the water connected, rather than divided, the Pacific Islanders. No wonder Mishra connects the sea to Hau‘ofa himself.

 

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“Why do we look / for sutures and siblings // in all the wrong places / when Google gives us // 22,950,000,000 results / for the word home?” asks Jennifer Robertson. The question, nearly as short as a Google query, constitutes the entirety of “We Grew Up in Places That Are Gone.” This brevity contrasts with the endlessness of the Google hits. Fittingly, each of Robertson’s lines contains just a few syllables—with the exception of the sixth, whose gigantic figure requires an unwieldy thirteen.

This overabundance, Robertson implies, does not actually offer meaningful information. Indeed, the poem, unlike result-rich Google, supplies no answer to the question at hand. Perhaps no answer exists—just as, for people who “grew up in places that are gone,” no home exists, either.