GAIA RAJAN

Poetry | Phillips Academy, Andover, MA

We Were Birds

That night he wore a white shirt and leapt

into the river. Didn’t surface for air. More water

than body, more tide than blood.

We’d just turned thirteen. After,

I closed every window. The mouths of tulips

broken. Beneath every oak, a lost limb.

I folded hundreds of pigeons, mangled paper into a beak

and a body. This poem is for how his voice cleaved the air

into feathers, how I took a knife to the wall after,

until a moon of light shone through the apartment,

until my knuckles bled like his.

Suppose I woke and saw only lightning.

Suppose the birds burned their songs

that summer. Suppose I speared sharks

in the river. I screamed Peter

which meant pray which meant please. How a name can sound

like a clock. A grave in a field full of ticking. Week-old

feathers. This boy, this bird— too human f

or this earth. Which is to say: sometimes, I don’t exist

except in the universe where everyone stays alive, where wings sprout

from our spines, where we have more to give

than prayer. Which is to say: the morning after,

I gave my bones to the water. Feathers wavering

in the river.

A blackbird in the oaks.

Nostalgia is the Prettiest Liar

I sit in the dark and watch a white woman cosplay 1930.

She says it must’ve been simpler back then,

incants it like a prayer, smiles and snaps white

gloves on. They say that back then, if your hands

were darker than the gloves, you were sent

to a different immigration center. They say

the alternate centers ordered more coffins

than water. A study shows that rhesus monkeys,

separated from their mothers, pick soft linen

over food. The monkeys weren’t named until

they died. The white woman likes old cars

and borders. Says reclaim with the confidence

of a guillotine. A judge, separating another child

from her mother, says I don’t remember

your names but I’m sorry, there’s nothing

I can do. Calls us doomed in the same voice he lists

his bills, the groceries. The white woman owns

fifty pairs of ivory-white gloves. A study shows

that ten people, left alone in a room, can recall

their ghosts so clearly the room begins to shake,

so clearly a table leg smashes against the wall,

so clearly a voice from their memories

wraps around them like a noose. Only some

can imagine the past and see a mission. The white

woman’s nostalgia flicks blond lights on

in the city and rides over skyscrapers. Doesn’t see

the people below, fleeing. Her nostalgia flays open

a past for remaking. Her nostalgia spears

peaches at the dinner table, blood seeping out

onto the plate, and it drinks until crimson smears

down its jaw, drinks until blood rushes

to its eyes, drinks and drinks and