Edited and introduced by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
This week’s poem explores the haunting silences found when looking into the past or the future. “Memory,” it tells us, “takes its retreat, / shuts the lights off, room by room.”
This poem appears in “Isako Isako” published by Alice James Books in Farmington. Mia Ayumi Malhotra is a founding editor of Lantern Review and has received fellowships from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop and Kundiman, an organization dedicated to the cultivation of Asian American writing.
A Decade Later, You Return to Your Childhood Home
by Mia Ayumi Malhotra
No one knows the exact whereabouts
of the ovaries; some things we’re not
meant to remember. After your mom
died, you left your childhood home
for good. Ten years later, it’s intact
only in memory. We siphon slowly
through the city, watch the skyline
slide past. Crossing the Washington
Bridge, you’ve come home at last,
though some things we weren’t meant
to hold. Tumors are most frequently
found in the ovaries’ epithelium.
Pressing hand to pelvic crest, I imagine
the incision, sutures. Steel instruments
easing each organ apart. Though this
is where we all began, no one wants
to return. Memory takes its retreat,
shuts the lights off, room by room.
Still, something stirs. Life’s germ shifts
imperceptibly—the future, a tiny, single-
celled fact, a body humming with secrets.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2018 Mia Ayumi Malhotra. It appeared originally in “Isako Isako” (Alice James, 2018) and appears here by permission of Alice James Books. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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