Unremember

One way of bringing you back is to observe
your garlanded frame as art: dying, obsolete
unappreciated between origami and handmade candles.
Another is to bring back the heat of imitation
leather from hospital guest beds. Who knew waiting rooms
were carriers of sweaty fevers, making it impossible to sieve
dream from memory: What could I have said to raise you
from the dead? What do volumes of elegies contain that I don’t?
Their own inabilities to say the unsaid to the one who will
unsee unhear untouch unmove un-understand, understand
I am trying to backpack through the geography of a future
without you, my compass, and no one has written a Lonely
Planet Guide titled 100 Getaways Without Mother, or
let’s produce a reality TV show for contestants to adventure
through losses on a shoestring budget: Today you are
not allowed to take the deceased’s name. Today you are
not to remember the way she smiled when she said yours.
You cannot hold faith as a torch light over reality’s head.
You will be disqualified if you re-enter the symmetry
of this world with longing as your wild card. For your last
challenge, you must dump the vanishing remains into a glass
exhibit and create an event of everything that is, label it was.

Keep Me Burning

I practiced crossing my legs the way my father daggered
his eyes at mother if I wore shorts. Twin openings
exposing more than what they could hold inside.
It took me three sex-ed classes & a crushed pamphlet
to know that I must fold and hold my body like a score
of eggs on a crowded subway. My period premiered
the night we went to watch Godzilla which wasn’t as scary
as the sports teacher asking bleeding students to sit separately,
in a lotus pose, a quick whip if the line of our panties showed
through the pinafore. We played telephone with our hands
instead of running in the sun. In Moral Science, the only girl
with waxed legs passed a chit under the smooth wooden desk,
it read When he touches, I feel hot & cold at the same time. I lay
naked on our marble floor, fevered. Under his ripped, full-body
poster. I touched myself the way my sister braids and wiggles
her toes, over the phone, under the sheets, coral pink, her words
like submerged seeds on strawberries (who knew those were
achenes, the berry’s ovaries). I asked mom what was the big deal
about sexing and she asked me if I’d eaten all my fruit at lunch.
What would Madonna have done?  I vibrated all around
my pimpled years with a Walkman or a home karaoke mic
between my thighs knowing there was a sound inside
that would leak on any given Sunday in choir as he’d hit
his solo bits of Give Me Oil in My Lamp. If only there was a way
to touch the difference between fill and feel. If only I knew
how I could make origami of my shame and let it fly fly fly.

Gridlock

My boyfriend did not leave me because I had arthritis that would make caring for his parents
difficult. That was his official reason. My body held that deficiency until he told me why, truly—
I’d been with several men while he had been only with me. He couldn’t understand why I’d stop
at him. I loved him. I loved that he cut up tough meats on my plate into bite-sized pieces when
my degenerating fingers couldn’t compel a knife. I used to delay scratching down his back, a
gesture that instantly made him come. His house was on Saat Rasta, seven roads radiating from a
traffucked circle. The evenings I drove to him, citing overtime at home, my widower father would
ask the maid to not cook dinner. Cooking dinner for one is wasteful. I sought love at the expense
of my father’s hunger, his shoddy supper of roadside bunmaska or anda-pav. I am starving you
to fetch you a groom, Papa, long-term gain! I did not say. I never felt guilt, only anger at my father’s
unwillingness (not inability) to care for himself. To re-strike a friendship, I met my (ex)boyfriend
for a late night show at the Imax dome. My phone died. The film was Life of Pi. I will resist the
lush metaphors that the movie provides because this is no time for meandering by beauty. When
you live on your father’s clock, there is no time for meandering. I drove home to find my father
had alarmed aunty-uncle-cousins to track me down. Cabbed through the city to trace my
whereabouts. My father shepherd-dogging me. I shepherd-dogging boy(s) simmering their sticky
outbursts. From within the cramped motor-whirring centre, arose spokes and exhaust fumes.

Business School

I’ve wondered what Mummy’s voice sounded like—internal scream,
knife against serrated thumb, or bitten tongue, when she discovered
she was terminal. I’ve wondered who pioneered the hatchet of keeping
this classified. Her, Papa, or their unmelodious duet.

The way they sneakily sold my second-hand purple Zen
the week I left for business school. We are big on savings.

I’ve wondered what sound soothed Mummy’s ears, cementing
her will to protect me from her upcoming absence—my victory yeses
in table tennis, my gratuitous yawns, or my drunken bray as Summer of 69
blessed the hostel halls. Those were the days I learnt

how with puffery, hyperbole, blowing up insecurities
you can sell anything: car batteries, contact lenses, gassed water.
Those were the days my father with silence, sparser calls and
strategic dilly dallying sold me a world where my mother was being saved.

*

 “Unremember” and  “Keep Me Burning” from Mother Tongue Apologize (RLFPA Editions, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Preeti Vangani.

 “Gridlock” and “Business School” from Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026). Copyright © 2026 by Preeti Vangani. Reprinted by permission of River River Books.

Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet & writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers (River River Books, 2026). Her work has been published in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 Pen/Dau Emerging Writers Prize.Vangani has been a resident at UCross, Djerassi and Ragdale. She has received artist grants from San Francisco Arts Commission and YBCA through which she facilitates poetry workshops rooted in writing grief through joy. She holds an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.