First appeared in Sugar House Review.
_____________________________________________________________

The Projectionist

In my dream,
he’s a projectionist
at an empty theater

and I am winding
the long staircase
to his stadium

of red high-backed chairs
waiting for something
to fill them.

In this dream,
we are still in love,
and he is queueing Alice

for us, the screen flickering
from black to the strange
forests of green

only real in film.
He latches his arm
around my shoulders,

and out of all that darkness
comes a single
wedge of light.

 
On the Third Month of Separation
​“Well,” Alice thought to herself. “After such a fall as this, I shall
​think nothing of tumbling down-stairs!”

In the South, sometimes heat
is the closest thing to love.
The days reduced to wet

blanket air and fearless
waterbugs. In this new absence
called separation, I have become

night-bound with voices
in a phone and three-dollar
chardonnay. The first day,

I drink myself to blindness, fall
through the lighted doorway
into an empty living room.

When I wake, the bruise sails
like Australia up my thigh. I don’t
want to think about fairy tales,

but I do, trained as a seal
on wet-eyed children’s promises,
the cynicism

of bootstraps and karma.
We all know, in this world,
nothing is untoothed. Satiated.

 
July

There is only one shirt still hanging
in his closet. A red button-down
that somehow eluded my whiskey-

licked packing. Everything his
turned out to the shed,
those plastic doors gaping

into the gray cave of his belongings—
an oversized microwave, crystal
wine glasses he filched from work.

Every time I mow our lawn, I open
this mouth and gaze inside—
it consumes everything

delicately, a tiny box
of paperwork, laundry baskets
laced with pillowcases and sheets.

Why won’t he come for them? Two months
gone and I cleave more of him
from our home every day.

And when I call, his phone is lifeless
in another state. Before the bans,
all respectable families burned their lawns.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake, 2011) and The Fear of Being Found, which will be re-released from Zoetic Press later this year. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.

Joanna Valente’s debut collection of poetry, Sirs and Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), is a study in human relationships among different kinds of kin — speakers, strangers, and family members both living and dead — that fleshes itself out through an extended homage to sisterhood. Three sisters’ voices overlap and interweave throughout this text; by turns, they dominate each other, themselves, and this collection, but never quite the world around them. These women, and the poems themselves, are defined largely by their positioning among one another. The voices of Tessa, Maggie, and Marianne, shaped by the experiences and fixations that preoccupy them, begin to glean identity from the light the other poems cast around them, as much as from the language and the soul that constructs each of them as separate identities.

And yet, despite all the togetherness, there is a profound sensibility of isolation in these poems. The sisters’ voices seem to mesh so well in part because of their respective isolations — they seem to have little else but each other. Valente utilizes ghosts to convey this sense of immersion without revelation or fulfilled exchange. In “Her First Love,” for example, it is “on the anniversary of her grandmother’s death” — a moment in which absence, a lost connection, is being felt especially keenly — that the boy in question invites the speaker over because, in his isolation, he’s begun to see ghosts (the text ambivalently implies that he sees ghosts of Elvis Presley — a pop-culture metaphor for the denial humans exhibit towards loss too keenly felt — and his own sister). The poem’s speaker, and ostensibly her sisters, “[weren’t] sure who was the ghost.” Perhaps this boy is already being depicted as an elusive character, someone the speaker cannot connect with as she wishes. After a section break, Valente gives it to us straight: “He tells her he loves her, that he means it. / They kiss & he pretends she is a boy.” Despite their physical connection and the intimacy of a shared space, where they are each other’s only chosen company, their connection is corroded, is false, is not to be trusted. The sisters are right to suspect his vicissitudes, his ephemera.
As such loneliness permeates the core of Sirs and Madams, it requires only a small shift for the reader to suppose that these poems are not only about the sisters’ loneliness, but about our own. In “Palm Reader,” Valente’s speaker addresses a deceased member of her kin, a former intimate, remembering ill-fated trips to the grocery store in the addressee’s later stages of dementia; she closes by indicating her preference for solitude, for the pain of an authentically ceased connection, over the wound created by a false gesture towards a continuation that cannot exist:

” You tell me I’m a good girl as I bag your groceries;

your voice came from the kind of dream where waking up
cold & alone is a relief.”

Valente keeps her speakers — indeed, the entire book — at a remove from the reader, as well. The title is evocative of the antiquated greeting of an impersonal, formal letter: “Dear Sir or Madam.” Even as Valente addresses her readers, she cannot entirely pierce their isolation, nor can we entirely access her speakers’ various states of alienation. Of course, it’s difficult to forget that “Madam” has a sexual connotation, too: the title of a woman who runs a brothel, another social space that puts people in close proximity to each other while failing to erase their deeper sense of loneliness, of un-coupled-ness. In this sense, “Madam(s)” implies “Sirs” as patrons of a brothel — a universe in which all women are madams and all men their patrons. Such titles bear a deceptive kind of formality — a tradition intended to civilize, to contain. Perhaps these poems embrace a certain kind of formal decorum because something needs to contain them, contain their heat and light and shadow and grit and verve. They are too aware of everything around them, everything swirling in collision in this too-big container of our universe (as Valente writes in “Everyone on the Other Side of the Universe”):

It was unbearable the way
he would send me to bed, tucked in by ghost stories

about children falling down elevator shafts, children
holding their breath underwater too long to swim

back up. Everyone on the other side
of the universe standing upside down in my closet,

tailoring my clothes in the reverse eye.
A lost earring, a stray cat — didn’t matter,

I knew it was them. As though they thought
I wouldn’t notice.

Even now, I sometimes hear them cackle —
like callous cicadas in reverb.
The awareness of other people, their felt presence, is a weight, is something that curdles these speakers’ awareness around the edges. How to navigate this world, this universe, so filled with other people and the butterfly-effect sensations of their existence? How to reckon the hostile distances between ourselves and others? Valente rejects all easy answers, and will not allow them (at least, not in the universe of this book) for her readers, either: she closes the collection with an image of Philomela, the woman who was raped by her sister’s husband, then mutilated (her tongue cut out) by this same man so that she could not share her story — a sickening connection, a vicious, vacuous kinship — waits for the three unwitting sisters “on that street to teach them/ the hate of love.” After the final wound: more blood.

Fox Frazier-Foley is the author of Exodus in X Minor and The Hydromantic Histories. She loves animals, art, travel, Vodou, and sleeping.

Detail shot from Medusa in her Sunday Best, oil on canvas.

MANDEM is the art name shared by Maize Arendsee (an art instructor and Studio Art MFA student at Florida State University) and her life-partner, Moco Steinman-Arendsee. Drawing on an academic background in classical mythology, gender studies, and critical theory, MANDEM works across media and materials (painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, and book-making), intentionally destabilizing genre in terms of content and media. MANDEM has received numerous art awards, including Juror’s Merit at the LaGrange National XXVII (2014) and First Place at the FSU Museum of Fine Art Summer Annual Exhibition (2014). While being widely published and nationally exhibited, MANDEM remains actively involved in the Tallahassee art scene. (www.MythpunkArt.com)
Artist Statement:

We are a transdigital artist. Our art is an exercise in categorical violations, simulation, and narrative (translation: we are makers, rule-breakers, tricksters, and storytellers). We work across media and materials: painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, and book-making, and purposefully refuse to discriminate between physical and digital tools. (This is an integration we refer to as “transdigital”).

The final products are a union of digital and physical medium such that the two become indistinguishable, and this ambiguity of medium is utterly intentional. This is a both-neither art — a cyborg art — half digital and half organic.

Our work intentionally destabilizes genre, both in terms of content and media, an intention born out of personal identity as a queer feminists. We are interested in subtle ways to defy comfortable expectations. Our subject matter is also liminal, often featuring characters of uncertain biological identity (blurring the lines between genders and between humans, animals, and machines), or objects caught between two states of being. We create work that is simultaneously repulsive and beautiful, and use this uncomfortable dichotomy to pull our audience in to the polyphonic narratives embedded in our work.

The work is deeply informed by our academic background in antiquities, mythography, intellectual history, and literary theory — our paintings, assemblages, and films transform the foundational myths and metaphors of Western culture to hint at a new post-postmodern (and quite often post-apocalyptic and post-human) mythos.

People I’d Like to Meet

Cult Statue of a Goddess
(found poem, Getty Museum)

1. Its provenance based on what we might term 
“forensic evidence”?

Briefly surveying in as neutral a manner as possible
the bravura display of wind-blown drapery over generous forms of her body,

illicit excavations in several archaeological zones,
I would also like to welcome the observers at today’s event:

Persephone
not wearing a chiton and himation but rather a peplos,

the enthroned Zeus
lacking any indication of characteristic décolletage,

possibly Aphrodite, Demeter, or Hera
armed with a magic belt of leather or fabric

purchased from a “supermarket magnate.”
One need only think of the systematic looting

in what was ancient Morgantina, near the modern town of
echinoid fragments,

the true right-arm socket
“skeletonized” by dissolution,

stored in a glass vial,
stored in boxes in the basement, all in style.
2. (unknown to anyone else in his family)

Good morning and welcome to the Aphrodite workshop.
A swelling, puffed-out mass around the face.

An exemplar of marriage for her human worshippers.
Stone for the limbs and wood for the body.

His father was a watchmaker who had worked in Paris.
An extremely immature, mixed calcareous sandstone

liberated through more mechanical weathering.
The morphology of quartz and feldspars,

also, presumably, gilt bronze hair,
suggest the traditional

submission to neutral, binding arbitration,
thin section petrography and scanning electron microscopy,

nannofossil biostratigraphy.
Fluorescence indicated modern contamination was absent.

Deep-water pelagic environment
calls for narrative explanation.

Pole

Often I had stopped, on my way down the road, to hold my ear against the pole, and, hearing its low moaning, I used to wonder what the paleface had done to hurt it.
—Zitkala-Ša, School Days of an Indian Girl

Persephone gone dark is disassembling
the telephone pole that connects
hell to the upper world. She wants to grok
the precise configuration

of wires that makes it possible
for her to speak to Mother
those wrenching seconds,
erratic e-motions

of circuits which allow
Mother to hang up on her
simply for stating the obvious.
Round thighs wrap old wood

as she begins to climb. Each thrust
splinters brown flesh,
sucks her backward
into memory’s spacetime:

frenetic flight through the woods,
tinkle bells of Mother laughing,
slip from the womb’s
warm walls of shame

which make her hell-home so familiar now. So
close she feels the sizzle off the wires,
could with her stainless clippers
sever the seven million

calls to the ones we curse,
Burn in Hades, bitch.
But all she wants to do is climb, run
without meaning or direction

beyond the acid ache of legs & lungs,
beyond desire or the end-state of suffering,
run to forget nesting in maternal arms,
run till she becomes running itself,

wind tearing out its own hair—
outpacing whispers & betrayal,
the memory of Demeter,
the letters of her name.

Experience the audio versions of these poems .

‘s latest book is Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment, published by , of which she is a co-founder. She is the author of the award-winning epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (2009), which was called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post, and she is editor of Out! Stories from the New Queer India (2013). She was graduated from Stanford University, was a fellow at Columbia University, and was a 2011 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar. As a writing coach, she loves helping people give voice to untold stories.

Photo credit: Celia Olsen

The Human Zoo

Soon I appear through the fog, my face presses against the cage. There is a scrim of dark edging the metal. You are there, pushing life toward my mouth with your fingers. Now I reach without biting. In the dark my own hands grasp how small & tame I am. You say, stay wild with your eyes & ideas. But imagine if my hand could not find your hand. Through the skin of what has survived. If I come up for air but then slip again beneath the current, remember how I glittered, with water pouring from every pore. You would walk down into our earth & watch me race behind the captive green glass. I leave you the gills of my faith, the jaw of my empathy. The flowers will remember my rain & my murmurs. How absurd I am. Even the thunderheads will remember a woman who shook with fire. You sink my net to the floor & work fast. It is how we must perform kindness. My flesh opens like a black claw. Why are you still not afraid of me? I want to see how close the sun will near the water. How the end will hold a woman’s wings above the flames.

______________________________________________________________

excerpts from your secret diary that is now mine
i fantasize about strapping my boyfriend to the top of my car.
it gets really exciting when he starts screaming and the winds are too high to hear him.

i drive until the sun goes down so far we can’t see the hills
because i mowed them down with my big wheels.

and i am laughing.
he will stop screaming when i stop laughing

because i have created a great hollow in the earth.
a grand canyon, really.

just for him.
he is unstrapped

he looks in my eyes
i throw him in the pit.

we have rough sex
he says i love you here is a gold star.
The Nine Circles of Ikea

she climbs the curious escalator
to the basso loco
up and up to

1. Kitchen utensils.
hanging from the fruit-flavored walls is the ripe Betty Crocker. she punctures me with desire, I mean the steaming oven and the thrill of chopping. the apron corset teaches you how to cook everything. her apron sex is amazing, among the boxed arrangements with the quiet sharp objects and the dazzling rouge lipstick smile. these are boxes of the happy. the order is the beginning of order

2. Window and floor textiles.
if there were a window,
there would be light.
her drape, the let-down hair,
this skirt, this hand.
the mirror does not wave back
when it shatters.
be my friend tonight,
be my

3. Food storage.
the box. in the box. the box in the box in the box. on the box under the
box beside the box over the box over the box over the box. over

4. Bed linens.
soil the sheets, save the bed. soil the bed, save the sheets.
burn the sheets. burn the bed.
when there’s nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire!

5. Shelving.

roof: dead birds. roof: bats. roof: drums. roof: darkness

the roof is on fire! the roof the roof

6. Storage.
bring the decapitated head. we must study his brain. not him. the head.
only the head. we must crack his skull and study his brain. only the head. here there is

7. Lighting.
i’ve got a man who’s always late, every time we have a date, but i love him. Yes! all those lights make you blind, but this is heaven. here you’ll find the feeling. is you is or is you ain’t my baby

8. Plants.
feed me, said the plant. feed me! tendrils crawling up your neck. feed me

9. The food shop at the end with Nordic foodstuffs (plus hot dogs and ice cream cones).
gosh. i haven’t bought the lingonberries. my husband will flip. he adores the lingonberries. with the water crackers and the fine linen napkins on the crushed velvet tablespread. we’d make love but not before the dustcloth runs over the tables. he hates the dust. it makes him feel like an ant under a magnifying glass in the sun. what shall i do? i am a mattress with a yellow ikea sticker in the as-is furniture. he goes to bed with me, and i wake up with him gone. like a bed, i am lonely. who else will sleep with me?

10. Checkout.
satan is red like santa. he places a claw on your hand.

trap door Buddha



trap door Buddha has a hole in his brain
a bronze plate in the bronze skull of his bronze head held together by four screws
(where birds nest inside), you see his face supported by
massive earlobes, which are growing like the rings of a tree only bigger and no root of it can be cut down.

trap door Buddha has three feet with three legs
and a body of sky above his subterranean head. the place where the head only inside is
a good place to rest awhile. just to sit inside the Buddha is a place to laugh and the walls
of Buddha’s bronze cavernous head echo with your surprise. it is a good way to hear yourself
curled inside the Buddha’s head sinking far into the ground like a bronze submarine into
the subterranean depths of your little head and

in your head is a three-legged Buddha nestled inside, resting three legs on the base
of your skull they root pushing out your limbs as you squeak out of the trap door
on hands and knees nose pressed to the ground and you roll over
and smile. paws in the air. just like that.

the baby birds peek out from the Buddha’s eyes and chirp for a while.

Hear These Poems Out Loud:

Annie Won is a poet, yoga teacher, and medicinal chemist who resides in Somerville, MA with her two fuzzy Maine Coon cats. Annie is particularly interested in spaces of mind, body, and page and creative opportunities within these domains. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Juniper Writing Institute scholarship recipient. Her chapbook with Brenda Iijima, Once Upon a Building Block, recently published with Horse Less Press (2014). Her work has appeared in Shampoo and RealPoetik, and is forthcoming from EAOGH. Her critical reviews can be seen at American Microreviews and Interviews.

In Caitlin Thomson’s Incident Reports (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014), the moon no longer appears in a post-apocalyptic night sky. Neither do the stars for that matter, but no one is counting these missing “bright holes” when loved ones have been “summoned” or go missing.

The theme of absence dominates the first half of the book. In the surprising and specific “Other Lovers’ Letters,” Thomson illustrates even in times of catastrophe and devastation, we navigate relationships and observe minutia.
“Dear Alexander, a reminder
to turn the stove off
should not be necessary.”

“Katrina, we have talked for some time
now about light and I must say
that I find the flicker of you appealing.”

Dear Jasper, teasing a sleeping girl
is not advised.”

Initially, there is a fear of madness, a flurry of locking doors, no discourse, as people begin to disappear. Birds, (and their songs, as Thomson points out) are gone, replaced with small rodent parades scurrying down the sidewalk or ants swarming in a basement. The humans that are left search for their place in a world without dreams. Here, in the titular poem, “Incident Reports: The Vanishing” absences are logged in case file format:

“Case File: No.1
My husband was washing dishes,
his hands in those yellow rubber gloves,
the water running a hum.
I looked up to a sink full of soap,
limp gloves on tiles.”

“Case File: No.7
The stars thick above me,
Fireflies coming out of the marsh,
mating. I leaned over to shake
my wife awake in her sleeping bag,
but the synthetic plaid
covered no one. I waited
two days, smoking
till my pack ran out.”

Not everyone disappears, unplanned. One speaker, unhappy, runs away from home and is just included in “the missing.” A house burns down. People are comforted by the milk man who still visits once a week. Interestingly, there is a paradigm shift halfway through these case file stanzas. The point of view changes. One speaker mentions missing a good conversation about politics or pie making – how everyone feels forced to talk about loneliness. Slowly, strangers are not afraid of “touch.” Many people from one block crowd into the same apartment building, sharing bedrooms. By Case File 21, there is a call to rejoice:

“Damn your tears and tissue,
you survived, celebrate! Have beer,
smoke, shoot out the windows
of the house, now empty, next door.”

Rioting is alluded to, but also something else- the desire to overcome “the vanishing” — to embrace life again. In the poem “The First Night,” characters left on earth cope by burying one another under leaves- almost child-like. Once safe under leaves and needles with orange sweater sleeves tied together,

“the longings we once held for mattresses, refrigerators, lamps,
replaced by lakes and loons before the sun rose.
Knitting scraps of wool into sweaters.”

Burgeoning acceptance of the situation evolves. Symbolically, people lose the desire “to write home.” A communing with nature erupts. Children burn their clothes and spend hours deer hunting – but “They smile more now, teeth shocking white.” (From At Sailors’ Delight, Take Warning.”) Maybe it is in the forgetting of baggage that true happiness lies. Our ability to endure is so human. Whereas the first poem in Incident Reports (“Space is Not Equal to Y or X,”) the speaker wakes “to the world constructed without dreams,” by the last poem in the collection, “Daybreak,”

“We caught the sun in our throats,
swallowed it for breakfast.
Dreamed of the white horse…
in a barn with cathedral windows…”

Humans dream again, repurpose a barn, carry light in their pockets. Maybe the god they waited for isn’t coming, but at least they are happy.

is the author of three chapbooks: Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications), Clotheshorse (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and Backyard Poems (Dancing Girl Press, 2015). Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in public places in Iowa City. Recent work can be seen / is forthcoming at Dressing Room Poetry Journal, Toad Suck Review, Red Savina Review, Toad: the Journal, The Poetry Storehouse, Quail Bell Magazine, Flapperhouse, and Hobart. She also writes for Insecurity Ragazine.

The Street Where I Lived
______________________(on one Facebook thread, I asked for a childhood address
______________________and a detail from that house. 24 hours later, I asked for an
______________________address where something bad had happened and one detail
______________________from that house)

I think it was on Reservoir Street
_____on 1234 Fremont Street
I think it was on Elemetra
_____on Huckleberry Road
named for Desert Avenue
named for Humble Avenue
named for Swallow Lane
_____for South Layton Boulevard
_____for the oil company
I think I lived on Park Avenue East then
_____on Primm Road then
_____on Lydale Place then
it was was Smith Drive then
where I lived__Denver Avenue
___________Buffalo Avenue
then or—Princeton Road
named for Paseo Primero
named for Menahan Street
_____for East River Road
I lived on East Fairfax then
_____on Northwest 60th Court then
or maybe it was Brookview Drive then
_____or Olympic Drive then
_____or Independence Avenue
where I lived—Puritan Avenue
_____lived—Greenbriar Avenue
_____lived—Ser Del Drive
where I—St John’s Avenue
_____I—Swiss Hill Road
_____I—River Avenue lived
on___17th Avenue South then
_____Offenburger Strasse 45 then
_____105th Place Northeast
where—I—University Avenue
_____-I—Rua Madalena
lived__Aleknagik Road
there_-Cain Road
there_-Bomar Avenue
there_-2234 Winnebago Trail
there on Elm Grove Road
_______Linda Lane
_______City Park Avenue
and__I think it was 3rd Street
instead of 4th__I’m sure
it wasn’t__5th or 2nd
where it all__ripped
__________climbed
__________sneaked
__________happened
behind the alley
behind the orchard
_____the playhouse
_____the orange tree
_____the splintery
_____the fire escape
_______balcony
__red porch—with raccoons
__________-with ice tea (hello)
__________-with brick light post leaping
__________-with low-hanging maple limb
our first and only dog
is buried there
where I lived—with red shag carpet
___________with windowsills 2 feet deep
_______________a swimming pool
_______________a big rock
_______________a ufo
_______________a wood-seated swing
my dad made
_______________mayonnaise on white bread
my dad made
and air conditioner
meant—blue sky with clouds
meant—baked asbestos shingles
meant—3—windows too large for the rooms
_______2 windows too small
meant poster with presidents
only through Kennedy
only red bicycle
only the dock where
company coming
only the torn corner
_____of a screen
_____of a cherry tree
_____of a porchlight
_____of grandmother’s cello
and I think it was there
storm torqued black crack
mustard yellow crack
emphysema there
divorced there
shot in the driveway there
_____my one-block-white
_____one-block–black tile there
_____sky turned yellow-green there
where I came home from school
______________from the neighbor’s
(that was Bit’s mother)
______________from Chris and Mandy’s
via satellite phone
via clock radio
via Old Time Rock and Roll
there waiting for my dad
_____2—windows too big
and I lived there
_____purple sheets
I lived there
_____school bus
I lived there
_____rushed the fence
_____whippoorwill
_____splintery
_____2 windows
_____my father’s swim trunks
tied to the railing

_______________________________________________________________

Saumya Arya Haas is an ALB candidate in Religious Studies at Harvard University. She lives with challenges due to a Traumatic Brain Injury. Prior to this life-altering injury, she engaged in interfaith/intergroup dialogue and Social Justice projects, advising organizations such as and , and has worked with the Parliament of World Religions, The UN World Council of Religious Leaders, and The UN Peace Initiative. Her work has taken her everywhere from West Africa to the White House. She is a regular contributor at , , and . Her writing can also be found on various other websites and in print media. Saumya is a priestess of both Hinduism and Vodou.
Fox: Thanks so much for coming to talk with us about your love of art and your writing life. I know you’ve published a lot of writing — on religion, on culture, and journalistic pieces — but you mentioned to me that you haven’t published a lot of poetry yet. I’m interested in how you got into writing. What pulled you into the kind of writing you do for HuffPo? What got you into writing in the poetry genre from there?

Saumya: I’ve always been a writer. I come from a family of writers (both my parents are writers and poets; my mother is also a visual artist) so I was encouraged at a young age…not just actively encouraged by my parents, but by being immersed in a family culture of reading, intellectual discourse, and self expression. I have dozens of journals of writing from my life and travels. In the late 1990s a I took a series of Creative Non-Fiction writing classes at Minneapolis Community College, and my professor encouraged me to submit one of my essays for publication; it was featured in a print anthology, but for many years after that, my writing was on my personal blog or for my interfaith and global education work.

My interfaith work was in cooperation with diverse organizations at the start of the social media explosion, so I was also responsible for blogging about our projects. One of my colleagues, a leader in the Hindu-American community, wrote for various religion and news websites. She liked my writing and invited me to submit something to her editor at The Washington Post. I was thrilled. This led to my work with Huffington Post, State of Formation, and other media sites. It’s hard to explain how it feels, as a Hindu American woman, to share my perspective with a national audience.

It’s easy to forget that, until quite recently, media was dominated almost exclusively by white male perspectives and the definition of “mainstream” was very narrow. There was little space for women, writers of color, and religious minorities to share their views with a wide audience. Although it’s still unbalanced today, it is possible (with an internet connection) to share and find more diverse representations of reality.

I have always written poetry but it’s not something I feel competent with. Many of my poems started as a few lines jotted down on a scrap of paper, intended to become a prose piece. Sometimes I get words or lines bouncing around my head and I just want to get them out. I love to read poetry, but it never occurred to me that I was a poet.

Fox: One of the things I love about this poem appearing on Poetry Blog today is that it addresses so many things — experiences of culture and gender and religion — in a contemporary, edgy way that feels very fresh to me. Can you tell us a little bit about your religious background? How does it inform this poem, and your other writings? How does it affect the way you think about gender (if at all), or the way you experience American culture (if at all)?

Saumya: I am Hindu by birth and inclination. “Hindu” means so many things! There are many Hinduisms and I only speak for my own experiences.

My Hindu heritage is from two different continents, and inextricably linked with social justice work. My father is a Hindu priest and was born in India during the British Raj (i.e. Colonialism). He was raised in a very traditional way; his first language is Sanskrit. His work with Hindu communities took him from India to Kenya to Guyana, where he met my mother. My mother’s family is also Hindu, and originally from India, but some generations back were taken by the British to the Caribbean (in our case, Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad) as Indentured Workers. While the Indian Diaspora community did not suffer the egregious wrongs of generations-long slavery, our cultural experience is not unlike that of the African Diaspora. One (of many) differences is that only a few generations elapsed for the Indian community, so there was contact with India My mom’s family were part of a Hindu group called the Arya Samaj, which among other things, was concerned with gender equality. My grandmother and mother were publicly acting as Hindu priestesses in Guyana at a time when, in India, this was probably rare. My mother grew up during a very tumultuous and violent time in Guyana’s history, so being a priestess was not just religious work. My family, especially the women, were community leaders. My parents were brown people from Colonial countries during the occupations and fall of the British Empire. Any cultural or religious expression was inextricable from social and political activism. Soon after Guyanese independence, my parents moved to the United States for my father to teach Sanskrit at the University of Minnesota. I was born here.

The Hinduism my family practices is an intellectual, philosophical tradition that is both, either, or neither theist and non-theist. We consider the existence or non-existence of God (and what one means by “God”) as a question with infinitely variable answers that it’s fun to discuss but not worth worrying over. We generally leave God out of it and move on the interesting issues of how humans experience reality, and how to make that experience productive for each person.

These are the very basics of our Hindu philosophy: to explore a statement, one has to consider that
It can be true
It can be not true
It can be both true and untrue
It can be neither true nor untrue.

This is not mainstream Hinduism, but our tradition is ancient. It also includes things like Yoga and meditation: ways of improving one’s life, with or without being attached to a particular religious or cultural tradition. We also perform regular Hindu rituals, so as priests and priestesses, we serve multiple purposes and communities.

My parents founded one of the first Yoga and meditation studios in the Twin Cities, and I went to Catholic School. I learned to describe, and defend, my Hindu religious culture at a young age. Besides that, I was a normal American tomboy. I was horse crazy. I rode my bike around the neighborhood and played baseball with my friends. I liked loud music and was not afraid to get into physical fights. On Fridays, I went to church at my school. On Sundays we had a traditional Hindu havan (fire ceremony) at home. To most of the people I met outside our home, Christianity was the norm. We didn’t fit.

When I was ten years old, we moved to India. I insisted to everyone that I was not moving “back” to India. I had never been there. It was not my country.

In the mid 1980s, India was very cut off from other countries: there was no internet then, and all the things I liked were unavailable. Last summer I went to see “Guardians of the Galaxy.” You know how Peter Quill was with his walkman? That was me: plugged into American music while negotiating an alien landscape.

We lived in a small city. The social expectations for girls (be quiet, get married) were ridiculous to me. Because my father was a well-known priest and a public figure, those expectations were doubled for me and my sisters. I, to put it lightly, rebelled. I avoided wearing Indian clothes and stuck to jeans and Tshirts at a time such clothes were considered slutty and revealing. I had this weird baseball-type hat with bright orange wings sticking out from it that I wore everywhere. People thought I was crazy. I don’t mean crazy in a quirky, endearing way. I mean: crazy.

Being a girl meant being demeaned and sexually assaulted pretty much every time I left the house. Unlike the vast majority of Indian girls, I did not tolerate or ignore this. If a guy, often a grown man, grabbed or groped me, I turned around and punched him. If he didn’t desist, I beat the crap out of him. To everyone around me, these men’s behavior was the norm; ignoring it was the norm. No one could understand why I was so angry.

Girls did not go out alone, for obvious reasons. I discovered a local riding stable, and began to go out by myself on horseback. No one had ever seen a girl on a horse. I was painfully visible. Men would block me from passing on narrow roads; I perfected an echoing war cry that startled them out of the way. I was pulled from my horse by my dupatta (a long scarf that is a staple of north Indian women’s clothing) and sexually assaulted; I stripped myself of all loose clothes and adornment and that could be grabbed, and carried a thin, whippy branch to defend myself. I was run off the road by a group of guys on motorcycles; I figured out that a horse is a thousand pound weapon. I was in a legitimately cinematic horse vs. car chase over miles of deserted mountain roads and trails; I acquired a dagger. Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, I punched, whipped, kicked, slashed, knocked over, ran down, and thoroughly cussed out more men than I can count. I learned when to just keep riding.

People ask me: where were your parents while this was going on? My parents did not like me riding by myself so I didn’t tell them anything. If I came home bruised, I said I fell off my horse. Sometimes this was true.

I didn’t want to be Indian, or Hindu, or a girl. I was at an age where my sexuality was awakening and I wanted to express myself in some new way. All the social messages around me seemed to conflate womanhood and victimhood. I was surrounded by images of powerful Hindu Goddesses, but being a woman was to be powerless. I had had profound experiences in temples, but I could see no separation between the expression of religion and the abuse I experienced every day. I didn’t know how to parse out the strands of becoming a woman. I didn’t know how to parse out the strands to make peace with my reality or myself. I fought everything.

Traditional adornment was certainly not my thing, so when my mom insisted that I get churis (glass bangles) for someone’s wedding, I resisted. I did love the bangle shop; it was kind of like Olivander’s Wand Shop from the Harry Potter movies: dusty boxes piled everywhere, opened to reveal sparkling magic (it has not escaped me that I often turn to sci-fi and fantasy to explain the plain realities of my experience).

The guy slid bangles on my wrists, and, knowing me well, told me how I could use them for self-defense. I was stunned and delighted. (BTW I do not endorse this, because it is insane and you could injure yourself, but if you find yourself in trouble with nothing but glass bangles to protect you, use the outside of your arm. The skin is thicker, and you don’t have major veins to worry about.) I will always remember that he said “adornment does not only serve one purpose.” My first inkling: I could enjoy traditional symbols of womanhood, AND I could continue to defend myself. Even better: feminine trappings can be a defense. Take that any way you like.

Soon after acquiring those first bangles, I tried to kill myself.

At the age of fourteen, with my parents’ full support, I left India to attend a boarding school in the UK. It was a wonderful, transformative experience. I eventually made my way back to Minneapolis. For many years, I did not want to have anything to do with India or Hinduism. I wanted to wipe out those traumatic years and just be American. I shielded myself in the trappings of America in defense against all the things I didn’t want to be. At the same time, I was interesting to my American friends because I was different. My past became fabulous stories; telling my stories became a sort-of performance art. I viewed my stories in a way that was distancing. I simultaneously expressed and separated parts of myself. I lived through an uneasy, ambivalent process of exotifying my past and my self.

Reality seeps in. Gradually, in fits and starts, I accepted that my experiences and my heritage were powerful, close, and necessary. Wearing bangles or being Hindu or being a woman means whatever I make it mean. It’s not my business what those symbols or words mean to other people. However, not caring about something does not insulate us from being affected by it. Wearing Indian jewelry or clothes in Midwestern America makes me visible in a way that can be uncomfortable; especially since 9/11, people can be hostile. Never mind the jewelry; I’d just like to be able to wear my skin color without people assuming that they know something about me because of it. I love this country, but it can be hard to live in. We have to carve out a space that suits our shape. I feel the same way about my religion, my adoptive countries, my everything.

We are living at a time that women’s and minority voices are (starting? sometimes?) to be heard; my parents fought for that, many people still fight for that. It’s a privilege I don’t intend to squander. So while I say “it’s not my business what people think” I contradict myself and make it my business by writing things that challenge limited perspectives. As a Hindu-American, I write to inform non-Hindu (usually Christian) Americans about my experiences. As a Hindu woman, I am often addressing Hindus in America, in India, around the world. I am part of these communities, but I am also apart from them. When I was a girl, there was nothing around me, nothing, that acknowledged my experiences and struggles; I don’t want other girls and women to be as isolated as I was.

Now, when I tell or write my stories, it brings them closer, not further away. In writing, I learn to own myself, even if there are things I would like to forget. Making myself visible through my writing is often uncomfortable. Being visible still feels dangerous. I try to live more honestly with both my trauma and my power. I’ve learned to live in, and with, multiple realities: Hindu, American, Indian, woman. Each of these encompass so much, and my experience is different from the thousands of people who identify with those labels. The only place all my diverse realities intersect is me; this is true of everyone. We are the result of, and subject to, so many intersections. Writing is my way of also becoming their custodian.

This is why I write. It’s not just to educate or inform others; it may to an attempt to change the norm, but it’s also an attempt to understand it, and to understand why and how I don’t fit. I don’t think my ambivalence will ever go away. But I keep writing. I am a soft-spoken woman who has dedicated herself to interfaith and intercultural understanding, but I’m also the girl who once rode a horse through a riot.

Fox: I’ve been talking with some of the other TheThe Editors lately about my idea of a “visionary poetics” — a kind of aesthetic in poetry that is informed by mystical experience, occult knowledge, or religious life — that is interested in metaphysical vision, but also in looking at things on multiple levels or planes of existence — looking at this world, too, and the connections and conflicts and contradictions in it, and trying to say something about how to envision it all together. Based on these ideas that have preoccupied me lately, I’m curious whether you think that your background as a Hindu priestess and a Vodou priestess shape your approach to writing and/or art — as someone who creates art and literature, but also as someone who loves and appreciates art and literature? If so, I’d be interested in hearing about how.

Saumya: I don’t think I can separate myself (my “self”) from my religions. For me, the task of creation is sacred, as is the result. Creation of art is a mystical experience, as is the experience of encountering art that resonates with us personally. There is something about art that, for me, goes beyond even my pagan-rooted appreciation and connection with nature, because with art, we know that another human being created it. The beauty and courage (creation is an act of courage) that humans hold within themselves, and share so freely, is astonishing to me. 

Poetry is sneaky. It is faster than our reflexive deflections. So it is the perfect medium to communicate mystical, emotional experience. We can reason and argue and cite our sources, but none of that can make someone change their mind; reason is useful, but it’s hard. We can’t often reason ourselves (or someone else) into feeling or not feeling something. Poetry is like music. It comes through our skin, not our minds. It makes us not just feel, but experience something. It’s a tuning fork that reverberates through our walls and makes us shiver. It lets others in.

I am eternally the “other.” I have never lived somewhere where I was not a minority. Even in India, which is 80% Hindu, the type of Hinduism my family practices is obscure. Unlike being a minority due to my skin color, I have (and have had) a choice to remain a religious and philosophical minority. I have never been able to comfortably absorb the surrounding cultural assumptions. While this can be difficult to live with, it’s also very freeing. I question everything (I’ve been told this is also very annoying). When I listen to people who are critical of their culture, I’m delighted, but I often feel that it usually only goes so far. Most people, especially in the – what to call it? Northern Hemisphere, the West? get stuck in duality: either something is true, or it is false. I am lucky enough to have encountered, studied, and experienced more expansive philosophies. How can I communicate those realities to someone else? When reason and argument fail, I turn to poetry and art.

In this, I am part of a long tradition. I can explain all about the Hindu Gods or Vodoun Spirits; I can share their resumes, as it were, talk about what they symbolize and the history of the cultures that worship them and bla bla bla but all of that intellectual stuff falls short. You want to know about Hinduism? Turn off the lights, kindle an oil lamp and watch the light flicker on Shiva’s face. Let me take you to the Himalayas. Stand within a temple carved by human hands expressing the divine. You want to know about Vodou? Come to a ceremony. Dance. Put your feel on the soil of Benin. There are many ways (certain geographies help, but they are not necessary). The words fall away and you don’t understand, you encounter. It is so much more.

How does this influence my writing and art? I have no idea.
Fox: What’s the most challenging piece you’ve ever had to write? What was especially difficult about it? Were you able to finish it to a point where you were satisfied with your results? If so, how did you get there?

Saumya: When I was thirteen, I witnessed a murder during a religious riot, after the (Hindu) Prime Minister of India was assassinated by her (Sikh) guards. In the aftermath, an unknown number of Sikhs: men, women, and children, were killed by Hindus in “retaliation;” there are some very strong allegations that people within the (predominantly Hindu) Indian government were complicit in, or encouraged, this violence. Witnessing someone slaughtered because of religious rage changed me. I have tried, and failed, multiple times to write about it. I took a Visual Culture and Religion class a couple of years ago, and for my final project, I drew a picture of what I saw and made a video narration of my experience. It messed me up. I still can’t write about it. Drawing it was possible. I had vague ideas of adapting my presentation for the public and sharing it somewhere but I do not have the fortitude to work on it. Maybe someday I will, maybe not. It happened over thirty years ago but I am still haunted by it. And I know I will be haunted until I share it.
Fox: Thanks so much for sharing all these stories and ideas with us, Saumya! You’ve given me so much to think about. In closing, I’d like to ask what writing (and/or other) projects are you working on now that you’re especially excited about?

Saumya: In 2013 one of my horses accidentally head-butted me, causing a Traumatic Brain Injury. It has altered my life. My symptoms make writing a challenge, so I’ve turned my attention towards drawing and sculpture. I’m very excited to see what emerges from that!

Bird, by Saumya Arya Haas, 2015. Ink and paper.

Bangles

Sometimes they annoy me and I say
I’m going to take them off for good.

I remember the night when the bangle-seller eased
them on: 
Bright and clattering, red and gold, spangly with glitter.

For weeks afterwards, small shimmers appear
On my clothes, my face, my husband’s blonde hair.

The gentle glitterbomb of Love and India.

I remember my regular bangle-seller,
Rotund and genial,
Telling me (I was 14) that if a man ever grabs me
And I cannot get away,
To slam my wrist against his eyes.
This surprises me:
They are glass, these bangles, decorative and fragile-seeming
Pretty, useless.
But he tells me that adornment never only serves one purpose.

These shining rings are blinding
In more than one way.
One at a time, they are delicate things.
I wear 30 on each arm.

And when a man grabs me and I cannot get away
I smash his eyes and nose and he lets go
Howling and calling me crazy.
I bare teeth, raise fists and shake shattered, bloody bangles at him.
He runs.

But that was a long time ago. Now they break
Against the edge of the sink
As I throw a ball for the dogs
While grinding spices
When I’m cleaning stalls
Or for no reason I can fathom.

Sometimes in the night I roll over and feel a stab at my back,
An unnoticed casualty tangled with us in the sheets.
I know how that one broke. 
I place it on the shard-strewn bedside table
And smile back into sleep.

My bangles are not so bright anymore.
Stripped of sparkles by 
The Indian Ocean
The New Orleans sun
My Minnesota farm.

I meant to take them off when I came back home but they stay
Loose against my dark skin
Jangling now against the keyboard
Chiming when I ride my horse
Dwindling of their own accord.
In the grocery store, a woman admires them and asks if I am a Hindu lady.
I say yes.

I smile at her and think, that’s me, darlin:
A Hindu lady, deadly and adorned.