Arvinder Kaur Johri

The River Did Not Take Her 

Father, the loud thud of your voice
broke her neck.

Meanwhile, I stood watching the birds with bleeding beaks.

Red vermillion bleeding from my mother’s hair parting
and staining my toes red.

We carried my baby sister and drowned her in the river
but the river did not take her.

Mother, you did not teach her to sink.

Father, did you know that the hush of a baby’s death
grows a shovel in a child’s body. The scraping
did not stop until a red tiny handprint in the column
of my backbone was dug out.

She came back and never left our bedrooms. 
Red wing on red wing on red wing.

red dove       red ants         red hibiscus

Kali’s hair burnished red on the fringes outside the frame.

I kept begging for her to show me her face. 

Arvinder Kaur Johri is an Indian American educator and poet. Her early poems were featured in Sahitya Academi’s Indian Literature when she was 23, and she is again ready to send her poems out into the world. Her poems have recently appeared in The Shore and Solstice. Johri’s poems explore memory, death, love, and displacement.