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[Without Isako]

By Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Poetry•Vol. XXIX No. 2 (Summer 2016)

Without Isako there is only the present moment which folds into a bright star lodged in the eye.
Without Isako I has nothing to say.
I sits before a page voided of language.
I drinks her tea.
I folds her hands and places her head on her palms.
I hears the door click shut as someone leaves the room.
I closes her eyes and listens hard to the room.
I hears nothing but the breath whistling in the back of her throat.
I feels nothing but the vice on her temples.
Without Isako the body is a foreign land. There is no way into its secrets. The mind that will not clear the jaw that buckles in the mouth.
I fills with buzzing from the light refracting off the present moment whose architecture resists it with curves and reflective surfaces. No place for memory.
Without Isako there is no way to move through.
I stumbles down unfamiliar streets in a haze of unremembering.
Has I been here before?
Names loosen from faces and disappear down a corridor grown labyrinthine
Where is Isako. Who is Isako. Are you Isako.
Will you help I remember what she has forgotten.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is a Kundiman and VONA/Voices Fellow, and her poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Mid-American Review, Drunken Boat, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is the associate editor of Lantern Review and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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