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Sharmila Voorakkara
USA
| Sharmila Voorakkara, a native of New Jersey, earned
an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, where she
was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. A recipient of a Hall Poetry Fellowship at
the University of Wisconsin, she is now an assistant professor of
English at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Fire Wheel is her
first book. |
Tow
You want some real bad karma, go into the
towing business.
—Waitress,
overheard
I'm not sentimental. I know enough
to work a man while he's hungry. Promise him a donut,
but save it for later.
I'm not the fast hook that falls from nowhere, but believe me,
when that fist arrives, it's loaded with quarter rolls! Life
is that wind-up without notice—and
wham! No, I'm not given to regret as the chain unwinds
like a woman's perpetual length of hair, then reels in
Buick, Chevy. Olds. In my rearview: a crying wife, screaming kids,
the weedy husband in boxer shorts
running out to demand—pigeon cheat with baseball bat, a shade
too late. Law says once the hook's in, it's
mine. I'm kept in the dark, which is best.
Good soldier, I have my orders,
and some things I'd rather not confess.
It's not sentiment that makes my little woman pound
the braid of my back, shouting relax, relax—but the ache
in my jaw when I think of my kid, pinning live
butterflies to a board, burning down the neighbor's
shed. His teachers tell me he's tried things
with the classroom hamster: is there anything wrong at home?
Hell,
the small fires that start
a family. I wasn't always this man with bad posture, done in
by antacids and a bed-wetting
boy. God knows, I still believe
the quarter-loaded uppercut counts for something
in the character of a man! Junior, I'd knock you
from here as far as straightening—
but wait—
my boy's got something hidden in his hands. . . .
He looks nothing like me. Damned if I know what's mine.
But blood is blood, as least by law, and the word of the law is this:
if you must slit the throat of thine enemy, do it while he's sleeping,
oblivious in his boxer shorts. Tonight,
the apartment block is lit by the rapid fire
of my tow light, light of aneurism and flashback,
that sets this weedy husband in stumbling flight.
Does my heart ache to see you
raise your bat and swing at the air of my remove?
Do I wince at the sound of your wife's sobbing,
at the sight of the twelve kids I wake and strand?
You might recede in the rearview, but believe me,
you will all collect. Revenge is not exact. It isn't sentiment
that moves me forward. No.
I'm watching my back.
Mercy
They have no memory,
chickens. Sinless,
those innocents slide past the watchmen
of heaven
as easily as grandmother did,
dragging her widowed shadow behind
her.
In life, wrapped in judge's black,
her fog of mourning robes,
she once called each cock by name
to slaughter. One by one they homed into
the gallows of her hands.
I interred her teeth
in a bottom drawer, relics clacking in a
heap
of pencils and spare change. Silver-veined
souvenirs, talk-bones small
as kernels, now
they gnaw
on silence.
In the afterlife's updraft
of hen feathers and dust storms,
grandmother clucks against
the nubs of her gums, worries with her
tongue
the nagging sockets of absence.
And the chickens flock back to her,
amnesiac angels, flying
on the stumps of limbs.
For the Tattooed Man
Because she broke your heart, Shannon's a badge—
a seven-letter skidmark that scars up
across your chest, a flare of indelible script.
Between Death or Glory, and Mama, she rages,
scales the trellis of your rib cage;
her red hair swings down to bracket your ankles, whip
up the braid of your backbone, cuff your wrists. She keeps
you sleepless with her afterimage,
and each pinned and martyred limb aches for more.
Her memory wraps you like a vise.
How simple the pain that trails and graces
the length of your body. How it fans, blazes,
writes itself over in the blood's tightening sighs,
bruises into wisdom you have no name for.
For Herman, Second Grade
The biggest boy sulks in the back row,
practicing the clutter of letters that become his name.
The yellow paper blackens with what he knows,
which is not much—or so they say. He'll never grow
inside: a dwarf forever in the mind. His lame
stare follows wherever we go. The biggest boy sulks in the back row,
and his sluggish print mows
down the horizon of lines: each letter—a house, whose broken frame
slouches toward the ground. The yellow paper blackens with what he knows:
thunder clouds, weighted with erasure, lower
over the houses' speechless remains.
The biggest boy sulks in the back row.
Brother dead, brother, he recalls, to no
one in particular, forgetting the name
that branches in stone and blackens the yellow paper. What he knows:
earth's plodding dark, the ground new-sown.
It's no use, the letters repeat themselves in vain.
The biggest boy sulks in the back row.
The yellow paper blackens with what he knows.
The Last Nickel Dance
A kiss maybe's as far
as your grimy nickel will get you.
That,
and a wood-hearted
waltz, and the sweep of my long,
dragging hem.
I'm tired,
goddamn.
The orchid on my wrist
shriveled days ago, now
rags out like a tongue. And still
I lead. I lead and I lead and I
wheel the paying men
around the bandstand's shudder
of flowers, while one-handed Sammy
tortures his accordion
into something wounded
and green—adagio—
with feeling.
Please.
My suitors like
a slow dance, they like
to press up close
and drool.
Love's what you whip 'til
its eyes cross, 'til its brain
pops, then sinks.
Sammy brings on a last,
heartfelt dirge; the accordion
curls and gives up
its ghost.
And my suitors clap
and act as if it'll take them
someplace, as if they could drag out
happiness, that old blue-
in-the-face, or they could ride out
its one, last, long-suffering
note, now swaybacked, now
milk-mouthed, as if anyone ever got home
on that old, that murdered
mule.
© All Copyright, Sharmila
Voorakkara.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By
Permission.
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