Arvinder Kaur Johri

When the Ghosts Settled In

How my mother threw my brother’s autism
and stammer in the well.

Her terror when she heard no sound - 
no echo, no gods munching. Her sobbing

in the cold kitchen where the kettle
hummed die slow. I was gone the next

morning. How I switched to whiteness
in this new land – white siding, white hydrangeas,

white sweetness. The migraines that came after.
I took shelter in dark rooms. I tried ingesting

a pound of spices to pacify the constant
churning of white steam in my stomach.

How the rooms became empty when my
children left. A week after, the bloodless encounters.

The sound of their nails. The eyes that laugh
at my nakedness. Mass suicide of my parakeets.    

Before the ghosts, I never counted my breaths.
I swing in their embrace and birth my lightness.

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.