Mayalu Press

Letter to Enisu,
Ode to their Ama

Mina was in the park with me
The day I thought of you again.

She didn’t care that it was a good day for it.
She sniffed my spool looking for a sign

I even fed her a second lunch
She still gnawed on the bamboo spine.

There is a kite shop in Kathmandu
That only opens once before the Salinadi fair.

Pratapman Shrestha’s family heirloom
Has been dwindling for 53 years.

During Dashain if you walk through
Kasthamandap you will smell bamboo strips,

jute and lokta. But you wouldn’t like it.
you would miss your Burmese studio.

My first memory of you:
A comparison between two kids.

Sweet Cimita picking aiselu with burnt fingers
and Hepeko, sick in bed with a common flu.

Smoke in both of their lungs.
You said you loved them both.

You never said much
about Sampa or me

“The stray” you whispered
Behind my back the first year

Appa let me stay in the hovel.
I was just a kid.

You had to clean up after me
I’d be afraid of the latrine in the dark

But everyone was pretending to sleep
So you’d walk me there, briskly.

Imported kites always bothered you.
Wayward and cheap

Plastic not lokta.
I didn’t mind them though.

They were easier to clean.
You never let me work with you

After I let this wild thing in
Leaving fur and paw prints everywhere.

The cat is old now
And you are gone.

Kitty litter hands every day.
Why did you put up with me?

~ Ekoro Tamang

10 000 days in

For the first time someone called me by my name
and I didn’t recognize it.
I am growing so fast that my vision sometimes blurs,
and I wonder how anyone ever stays still
long enough to call themselves anything.
I am burning and I cannot see past my eyes,
past the moving, rushing by,
drowning my heart in my chest, in
my throat, pressure and heat and
the strongest feelings you’ve ever felt,
love like you can’t imagine, not because
it burns but because it stays, like magic
it stays, it burns marks into you, like
butterfly kisses. And sometimes you go
outside and the crows are flying all
together, or the sky is screaming in blue,
and you want to sink to your knees
and empty out your voice and weep
and pray for it to go on forever.

I am 10 000 days in and it is
meant to get easier soon and
I hope that is true for your sake
but I don’t think I could bear
it if it stopped hurting so much,
if my head stopped swimming.
I am tired, but I can close
my eyes. Please don’t stop
coming at me. It is the privilege
of my life to change, to feel,
to struggle for understanding,
to fight for my days.

If you are born someday, and I hope
you are, I hope you know that
I knew you would suffer and I chose
to wake you up anyway.
10 000 days and I am not ready
for you, which is to say, I will never
be ready for you, or I will never
understand, and I hope never to.
Every day I fight to live with myself
in this world. Every day, which
comes so quickly, takes so much
of me. Every day I am loved,
which is a miracle. Most days, I am
even loved by myself, even through loathing.
I hope one day I can show you how
hard life is. I hope you forgive me. I hope
you want to fight, too.

~ Juni Kieri