It’s Safe to Say

what’s inside me is mostly micro–
plastics, aggressions, little apertures
into memories that lock me wordless
within my body. I live closer to bone
than flesh when I am in the world,
the cliff of my jaw set to defend,
unclench only as the bus lurches
up the street to the place where I live.
Alone in the city I marry silence
of anonymity, of my grandparents,
refugees practiced in surviving
the unnamable. At night I visit
the half of my lineage that lived
under Occupation, relative privilege
of not fleeing, of being watched,
taught to speak English with mother
tongue less valuable in the big city
where my grandmother lived after
she left the village that raised her.
She appears in a dream almost two
years after she dies, almost alive again.
I know not to tell anyone about her
or a few months after she died,
the elder at the store in search
of her children who lost track of her.
With a smile she repeated my name,
the same as her granddaughter’s.
How to explain that a stranger knew
I needed to hear my name held by kin.
The urgency of belonging to my people
dulls with time. Grief requires performance,
some righteous claim to possession,
but loss just is. Missing is self-intimacy.
I owe no explanations for silhouettes
in my mind in the absence of photos
of past lives that do not include me.
Gone means freedom to look back
without the confinement of fact
even as routine moves me from errand
to meeting to obligation with little fear
of unmasking my softness, how easily I
come undone. My best-kept secret: my heart
is not my heart. In each chamber lives
one of my grandparents, a room of their own.
I protect them when I tighten my lips
during the digression at the interview:
How do you speak good English? It is for them
that I take a breath when a coworker decides
to convince me: The English were so tired
when they had to go home. It is for them that I don’t
vacate my body at the suggestion that our ruin
was a vacation for colonizers living it up
in their imperial vocation. Safety is a myth
my grandparents fled so that I could exist.
Return is a myth they never once spoke of.
Once stolen, home can never be retrieved,
only imagined. Never as it was or could be,
but in a sudden blur of feeling and breath.
Here and gone. Here and gone. Sometimes
I can only nod, go back to work, get on the bus,
get off the bus, unlock the door, die a little
more with every scallion I slice to swallow
in small bites. Now I understand why
my mother taught me to chew without
sound, noiseless. No one wants to know
what keeps me alive is what keeps me
out of reach. No one wants someone
who is slow to respond, slower still
to ask to be held. No one wants to see
what’s on the inside, the overgrown thicket
that keeps us tethered to our bodies,
to the tenderness of being. No one wants
to say how hard it is to stay because staying
here means touching down and touch is
the risk that you could lose everything
again and again for as long as you live.

SANJANA BIJLANI writes with questions of care and accountability. Her writing appears in wildness, Cream City Review, 68to05, and elsewhere.