Windward Review Vol. 20 (2022): Beginnings and Endings

I stand by her feeling like a shabby trophy.
Everybody is surprised that I am much older than I look, “you look too skinny
to be a professor”, they tell me,
And often these conversations end with them entreating me to eat more.
I try to busy myself washing teacups and carrying biscuit trays...
but when the monsoon rains made the ground muddy,
I grew bored and disgusted and withdrew to the chair by the door next to the
sanitizer.
Love in the time of corona.
Death in the time of corona.
I grow exasperated watching people mindlessly trying to pump sanitizer out
of a spray bottle, and I attempt to remedy it by spraying it onto the hands of…
guests? Funeral goers? Mourners? I’m not sure what the appropriate term is.
This too would have been incomplete without the drunk uncle. The neighbor.
Insisting on bearing the weight of sorrow.
I wonder how often we’d visit now...
now that you’re gone.
I realize that as long as your gut lays buried in the backyard,
you’re not entirely gone.
But I doubt we’d visit your gut.
My father appears more insensitive than ever.
I wonder if that’s his way of grieving...
Or had he too grown numb after all these years of grieving.
He’s afraid of germs and I feel angry. He demands to ride back home
Before the rain
Before the evening prayer service
I ask him to join us from the doorway as I enter and stand beside you;
violating PHI Something Health Regulations.
My peripheral vision affirms my father’s luminous raincoated presence
looming by the doorway growing anxious by the minute as the hymns draw in
crowds like moths to a lamp.
I also wonder how we’d be,
My brothers and I,
When we meet after long years at funerals.
I realize your generation has left... taking with it some others,
Like my uncle,
He had been 23.
Younger than me.
I wonder how today would’ve been had he been there,
I’ve heard wonderful stories about him
Beginnings X Endings
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