[232 words]
I promised you a permanent home
a decade ago when we married.
On our beach-front property
of bamboo tent-poles and plastic tarp
we celebrate our anniversary.
I drape you in a Nauvar sari
and we toast with cane liquor.
I lost favor with my father;
you were not to be found in the Vedas,
nor were you meant to labor
in service to others. As a girl
polio lamed one of your legs,
as a boy I lost a hand in a hay-cutter.
In a well beneath the shore
the warm water is sweet,
a three-day harvest of microgreen
fenugreek. As sprouted seeds
they taste like the sea
and the news it brings of lives
in Mina Salman and Muhammad Bin Qasim.
But I have a humbler dream:
A cabinet to comfortably house a blue deity,
time enough perhaps for the crack
of white willow on cork and leather,
in the summer a cold glass of nimbu pani.
What is there money cannot solve?
Is he lifeless, the man
by whose side you lie?
I will sell pirated videos on a busy road.
I will pack mud into clay cups.
I will pan sewage for gold.
The stray dogs cannot help but smile.
Somewhere a dolphin
curves back into the river.
An insect reviews its past life.
Stones are born in the western countryside
as we name our children like a price.
Jimmy Saekki was born in Seoul, South Korea. An American citizen, he has been an expatriate for nearly two decades, living in various places across Europe and Asia. His poems have appeared in Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology and Commentary.
