by Lauren Suchenski
Poet’s Statement
“Last summer, my husband and I piled our seven-year-old daughter and two dogs into the car for a road trip across California and Oregon. We traveled north from Los Angeles, stopping wherever we wanted and letting the places come to life in our minds. I was on the edges of a personal sadness and healing from it, deeply affected by the redwood forests but also by washed-out small towns like Eureka. As the miles passed, I felt a leavening of sorrow. Places can heal us. Being in between can also heal us. I felt that keenly.
As a South Asian Indian family, we were sensitive to Oregon’s history as a state founded by white people, meant to be exclusive to them. We had heard it is one of the whitest states in the country. Some of this awareness finds its way into the poem ‘In Bend, Oregon’. The place struck me with its beauty but I knew I would never consider living there so it was a beauty observed from the outside. There is a sense, I think, of this outsiderness. Yet, nature rising all around us, seemed more inclusive, or at least, blind to human divisions.
The third poem was triggered more directly by the pandemic. As my twitter timeline filled up with stories of loss, I accessed a memory of grief. My father died of cancer a long time back and the poems I wrote immediately after were more raw. I think time has had its way so the tone of this one is more hopeful in the end, a notion of him finding the peace that eluded him in life.”
Eureka, California
The ocean dingy as if unwashed & my dreams blade-
edged. Cars high-wired past with people desperate
for elsewhere. I underwent a season of forgetting.
I won’t get into how sadness can blur or skew sight
like a trick of light. Motel windows, cars in parking lots,
the Starbucks with lonely green signage—all odd, misshapen,
bruised. Mussed palm fronds, blued. My dog’s breath
thinned. I will say crying muted does not help sometimes—
it needs to be loud & delugional, a devolution
before we get through, before we climb back into the derelict
building of self. The room with clashing bedsheets
& cling-wrapped plastic glasses, promised fort / coffee,
food, a bed forenight. The radio playing Try over and over
was cliche burrowing into body to become real / healing
like a lagoon swam into view as if dragging itself
from under a great weight / a guarded gallon of waiting.
A whale bloomed like an uprising.
by Anindita Sengupta
In Bend, Oregon
a garden
is a river of glass is gold fizzing
in glasses
the headlong hurtle
of a kid toward friendship
is a clear & brown sparrow
hopping in snow
hopeful rejected forlorn falling
feathers frozen out
thinned
Ice like a furloughed person
drawn tight
awash in loneliness
The river long & lunging,
white elbows like gauntlets,
running on
through sagebrush & alder
elder & sanguine
watched by bald eagle osprey
peregrine falcon & lynx,
our loneliness washed
by its hands,
its every snail, heron and mink
standing on the banks
in the night every night
and in all our mist-soaked mornings.
In further glistening field
You occupied space as if you would infinitely.
I saw you as artwork when you saw yourself as map
This was my betrayal, an inability to mirror.
At the hospital, I stood in a queue, picking at
your name in a dusty file, picking you out
from a faded blackboard they hung on the wall.
They gave you a patient number and six months.
Shadow bird. Geological marvel. You outlived
but with rage as you had always. The thing
about exceeding expectation: it’s a flowstone,
breath as charcoal flaking. I sat by your bed,
digging at words from a book. There are those
who go gently. You were a cloud with a hole,
angry with all who would outlive you.
I want to say I understand. Two forces inside us
all our years—the one turning toward the light,
the other hanging, wingless and wine-glassed
while the earth thrums above our heads. I read
and cried while you waged war for your lungs.
The past is a ticketed show. I salve albums
for them to heal. At the river, I swung a wide arc
in the air with your ashes. Spelling all the names.
Are you in a clearing now? Are you padding through,
leaves rustling under every hoof, your heart
like the earth’s dissipated, soft and gentle,
nowhere and yet everywhere?
Anindita Sengupta is the author of Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall, 2016) and City of Water (Sahitya Akademi, 2010). Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals such as Plume, 580 Split, One and Breakwater Review. She is Contributing Editor, Poetry, at Barren Magazine. She has received fellowships and awards from the Charles Wallace Trust India, the International Reporting Project, TFA India and Muse India. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California. Her website is http://aninditasengupta.com.
Lauren Suchenski has a difficult relationship with punctuation and currently lives in Yardley, PA. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, three times for The Best of the Net and her chapbook Full of Ears and Eyes Am I is available from Finishing Line Press. You can find more of her writing on Instagram @lauren_suchenski or on Twitter @laurensuchenski.