12 p.m. Preeti Parikh

I come from cantonments, jongas and jeeps, one-ton and three-ton trucks hauling military engineering equipment— I come from bridge construction sites, the mile-wide Brahmaputra river flooding, army helicopters summoned for rescue operations— I come from the words forces and civilians— I come from small hill stations and capital cities rchitecture by British colonials— I come from joint families and ancestral homes long razed and replaced by millennial buildings— I come from misri, panjiri, nutty wheat flour roasted on iron skillets— I come from pine trees, morning bugle calls, blanket and bedding in hold-alls, trunks, hole-in ground toilets— I come from 8x10 hostel rooms, immersion rods warming bathwater in buckets, laundry drying on clotheslines, benches on stepped terraces— I come from power outages, inverters, petromax lamps— I come from backyards with jackfruit trees, rows of bathua, carrot, cauliflower, pepper plantings— I come from home kitchens with makeshift temples and neem leaves steeping in saucepans— I come from the northern plains of the Ganga, from the waters of Teesta, Chenab, Tawi, Jhelum, Yamuna, Sabarmati— I come from desert sands billowing into turbaned heads and veiled eyes— I come from sleeper cars in narrow gauge trains, water in matkis, and chai in kulhads on platforms— I come from childhood collections of coins and erasers, first-day postal covers, books amassed and circulated amongst school friends, a precise one-to-one bartering— I come from the family motto: Help others, and God will take good care of your life— I come from questioning God, questioning life— I come from curfews, communal riots, immolations— I come from an undivided Indian subcontinent— I come from partition; I come from separation.

I heard there was a time when the news was dropped off at your front door, tightly wrapped like a present of sorts and printed with dark black importance on the backs of dead trees, your unrolling of the world’s enrichment, the first sacrifice of your morning, right after sleeping: the last sacrifice of night and right before your first ritualistic kitchen devour.

And I imagine how these readers of the past would go to find a place, probably the same place as last week, and flap open the butterfly wings of the newspaper, nonchalantly hungry for the best worked happenings, so they could go into the talks of their day feeling primed, well read, and ready; aficionado on stock prices, lost dogs, drug scandals.

And how sweet it must have been to read the typings of the world, curated and succinct. And even more how sublime it must have been to have it all end, to put the paper down and be done with it, close your shades to society and its grimy violence, back deals, syrupy success stories, headlines of hazard. To go about your day untethered to it— now the news envelops us always.

I open the app to see my friend’s faces and there it is, news of a baby falling from a 12 story building. I scroll to my home screen and Apple positions all the world’s affairs in front of my eyes and it is like lightning across the window of my phone, who could manage to look away? Our world is like a car crash, no like a highway pile up, and all these news sites are like watching the fenders collide into each other over and over again.

The notifications announce themselves to me this midday and I see that another story of nature’s revenge, hurricane or tsunami or landslide has come, I slide the messages away, but I do not turn them off. Turning them off would be like turning away from the awful. I grow guilty whenever I do not hold the tragedy of these stories second hand, continual consumption seems the least I can do. Me and my entire generation has lost their ability to put the paper down and so we read from morning to night and roll it all over a second time in our dreams, almost as penance for the bad news not having our names in it.

for Beatriz Fernandez

“I think everybody in the poetry community deserves their own moon.”

—Todd Dillard

Who can resist the pull of Ganymede, the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field, named for the most beautiful boy? And don’t most of us make the mistake of taking whatever is largest—a slice of cake—or most lovely— that gorgeous boy—even when we know they’re not the best for us? Then I leap to the other extreme: I think of Deimos, smallest moon of Mars, the 8-mile ball I could keep in my cosmic pocket, but who wants to carry even a small amount of dread? Then I turn to Io, and my mouth keeps turning the vowels over and over. How could I resist the liquid sounds

that label the driest object in our solar system? How can I help but see myself in one of the few mortal women beyond this earth? What woman doesn’t contradict herself and burn. The lava lakes call to my tongue. Io. This is the one.

for Charnell Peters

because she’d smelled the baking bricks / and wondered what the humans were up to this time / she saw the tower / and the men trying to be big and famous / instead of spreading across the earth like she’d said / building this tower as if they were the witches to imprison her / climbing it as if they could be the ones to save her too / she did not let down her hair / but dropped down herself / nothing you plan will be possible / she said / if you won’t listen to me / you won’t understand each other either / and their speech shattered into languages / the men stopped building / and before the people scattered across the whole earth / the supervisor shouted / why can’t you all just speak English! / but everyone / even God / ignored him

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