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a literary journal published by the Black Earth Institute dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society

Yamini Pathak


I Have Eaten Under Her Skies

A good cup of daal began for me with a skip-hop-bounce

to market, hanging on at the tail-end of

my mother’s saree

 

Sacks of jute at the grocers stood

high as my chest —

some packed firm with kidney beans

some with beads of forest-green mung

or yellow mung, delicate and pale like winter sunshine

 

I trickled them through my fingers  pebbled river-smooth  a susurration

like the rustle of wind through palms

 

In the kitchen, Ma sat low on a stool with a platter of seeds

in her wide-spread lap

I leaned my weight

against her side, settled in to watch

her fingers flick like needles

pick out scabs, bits of stone and straw

 

She told me a story about the discards      how they travelled    all the way

from a field beside a hut in a village where the children run barefoot and laugh in the dirt

 

She washed, and soaked the beans, and washed again

until the dust and the footprints of the children drained away

 

Scoops of turmeric and coriander   from the spice box

made their way into the pot the passion of red chilies  the stoic balance of salt

 

Then the boiling, the puffing, the scream

of the pot-bellied cooker, its contents pressed

into soft-bubbled lava    seasoned with a sputter of

hot oil and cumin   a lime squirt, clenched in sour-bitten lips  a fistful of cilantro

 

I pouted       pretended escape   eager for capture by her gentle arm

Ma mixed boiling daal with buttered rice   scooped with her fingers   taste

of her skin  lilt of her tale    in my mouth as she sang, bite after bite:

 

one for the village childrenone for you


Crop Cycles

Yesterday, the first day of autumn

came round again: someone winnowed it

all away. The field sports a golden

stubble now. All summer

its upright citizens advanced

skyward, leafy chests puffed, bayonet

tips aimed at the roiling heads of sky

that plot thunder and gush. Creatures

rustled in the undergrowth. I love

that I’ll never learn what dramas swarm there

beneath the bulging eye of the moon. Dirt clods

remain, the last honks of bullfrogs

from an oozing bog. They don’t fight

the fallow days. Deer family picking

its way on slender ankles. The hunting season

will soon be upon us

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Yamini Pathak is the author of the chapbooks Atlas of Lost Places (Milk and Cake Press) and Breath Fire Water Song (Ghost City Press). Her words are forthcoming or have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Vida Review, Waxwing, Poetry Northwest, The Kenyon Review blog, Kweli Journal, and elsewhere. She is a Dodge Foundation Poet in Schools, serves as poetry editor for Inch micro-chapbooks (Bull City Press), and is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Yamini is an alumnus of VONA/Voices and Community of Writers. Born in India, she lives with her family in New Jersey.


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