This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Sally Rosen Kindred, is from Atlas of Lost Places by Yamini Pathak, released by Milk and Cake Press in 2020.
Elegy for the Way Home
Hidden behind your tongue pooling in saliva dissolved in salt and rust the word for mango aam is the same as the word for common In India it was common to sit cross-legged on the swept floor of your father’s house suck the delight from the conch of whole mangoes taste their pickled sting with your fingers before they tenderized your lips made sour, your teeth Where shall you go my sons? How will you ask for answers, meaning uttar in your grandmother’s mouth, meaning north, meaning crowns of Himalayas, plains fertile with sinuous river-Goddesses, your meridians lined on your palms and your genomes, meaning you were birthed from a language where parsaun, the day after tomorrow wheels around to point at the day before yesterday
Yamini Pathak is the author of the chapbooks Atlas of Lost Places (Milk and Cake Press) and Breath Fire Water Song (Ghost City Press Summer Series 2021). Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in Vida Review, Waxwing, Kenyon Review blog, Anomaly, Kweli Journal, and other places. She serves as poetry editor for Inch micro-chapbooks (Bull City Press) and as a Dodge Foundation Poet in Schools. Yamini is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is an alumnus of VONA/Voices (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation), and Community of Writers.
Sally Rosen Kindred‘s third poetry book is Where the Wolf(Diode Editions, 2021). She is also the author of Book of Asters and No Eden, as well as three chapbooks, including Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She teaches online workshops for The Poetry Barn.
