The Ancestors Invited Me to a Family Convention
& sent it by a chatty, brown-winged
myna bird. Our conversation lasted
centuries. The only word we spoke
was my own name, her golden beak
calling it back to me—
(calling it back to me)
Hundreds of years: that’s the time
it took to speak to every life
inhabiting those echoes. I went to
reach for my own gold ornaments
but the bird’s crescent talons tapped
the edge of the time-worn cardstock,
tiny letters reading
come as you are.
I came as I was to the place
where all the tributaries met
& met them all there, wearing
my father’s broad nose & my mother’s
wide-set eyes & my grandmother’s
wild curls & my great-grandmother’s
secret smile. & there, the puzzle
of everyone’s features assembled itself
with no outside help, everyone
remarking, I wore it best
about themselves, because a face
is only a mask when you are not yourself
& here we were faced with
a constellation of ourselves.
& my great-great-great-great-great grandmother
stroked the frayed edge of my hand-me-down handloom,
woven from banana leaves & salt crystals
& the mud formed from a summer’s worth
of downpour mixed with a plateau’s red dust
& said it was the finest she’d ever seen.
I felt sure I’d seen nothing in comparison,
nothing at all, maybe a single afternoon
of rain. But at that moment
the light skirted the clouds
& I noticed I had her hands—
the same palms with lines snaking
like rivers that I trusted
would meet, eventually.
Nina Sudhakar is a writer, poet, and lawyer based in Chicago. She is the author of Where to Carry the Sound (winner of the 2024 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and a 2024 Foreword INDIES Award) and two poetry chapbooks, Matriarchetypes and Embodiments. She serves as Dispatches Editor & Book Reviews Editor for The Common and as a Board Member of the Chicago Poetry Center. For more, please see ninasudhakar.com.
This week, SWWIM and Matwaala are coming together to celebrate women writers of South Asian heritage with a week of poetry and a SWWIM x Matwaala writing residency and reading at The Betsy-South Beach featuring visiting writer Nina Sudhakar and local writer Carolene Kurien. (The reading will take place on September 11 at 7:00 pm. Please join us in person or via Instagram Live or Facebook Live!)
Matwaala was launched in 2015 to increase the visibility of diasporic South Asian poets (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Afghanistan) in the mainstream American literary landscape. The name Matwaala in a transferred sense suggests the intoxication of poetic creativity. Matwaala showcases the diversity within the South Asian community—and within the Indo-American community.
A note from Matwaala: Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, is honored to join hands with SWWIM in celebrating a week of South Asian poetry that celebrates Matwaala’s tenth anniversary. A thoughtfully curated selection of women poets offer us a constellation of rich poetry this week. Together with SWWIM, we affirm poetry’s power to bridge distances, and amplify voices.