Danusha Laméris

January 19, 2024

“The Visitor” by Danusha LamérisPosted by

Danusha Laméris

THE VISITOR

You can get used to almost anything. 
Like whatever it was that lived
in my best friend’s house when we were girls. 
You’d hear its steady tic tic tic up and down 
the stairs, feel it sweep past you 
in the darkened hall. And what about 
 
those nights we stayed up late 
talking in the living room? How we kept 
turning up the heat, but each time, the dial 
slid back to its familiar chill.
 
The story: a medic back from World War II. 
His apartment in the attic.
 
Which explains the time she woke 
and saw a grizzled countenance
gazing down at her, a flashlight 
fixed on her face. 
 
And somehow, even after that,
kept on sleeping in her room, 
dreaming under her thick blankets,
while he went on clodding down the hall, 
taking notes, checking beds. 
 
This is how it is to live with loss, 
the visitor that never leaves. It walks 
through your house. It eats your bread, 
sleeps in an upstairs room. Sometimes, 
you pass in the kitchen, give 
each other a nod. More ordinary 
 
than terrible. Except, some nights, 
when it wakes you, shines its full heft 
in your face and what was broken in you 
breaks again, though after, your one half 
 
tells the other what it knows: 
such sorrow means you have survived, 
have lived to bear its weight.
 

—from Rattle #82, Winter 2023

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Danusha Laméris: “I write because I am trying to get closer and closer to the marrow of it, whatever the It might be. I write to try and find order in chaos. And sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I do.” (web)

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September 22, 2021

“Appointment” by Danusha LamérisPosted by

Danusha Laméris

APPOINTMENT

I’m leaned back on the table, the nurse strapping 
a band around my bicep, when she says,
So, your son must be thirteen by now. No, I say 
he’s dead, which isn’t how I mean to say it.
Oh! she says, your chart. Yes, I say. His birth,
the year. And now she feels bad. I’m sorry, she says,
I’m so sorry. It’s OK, I tell her, but the reading is too high,
the pressure. We’ll try and do it again, she says.
Again. Again. The times I step back into the story,
and in this story my son is still living inside
me, he’s aquatic. I am the fish bowl and he is
the fish. I imagine his bones, his lungs, the small
perfect heart. And also, his hands, his feet. 
A body growing inside another body. So precise.
And then he’s on the outside and it doesn’t work:
The air. Gravity. I want to apologize. He can’t breathe
right, he keeps convulsing, the electric
surge ticking his head to the left, the left, his
lip curled in disgust, but no, he looks more afraid—
some terror coming towards him. Not blue, not blue, 
I tell myself the times it happens and he isn’t. 
The doctor says, the bad kind of blue is cobalt, smurf blue. 
Dusky is not the worst kind. But how does she know 
on a baby this shade of brown? Does she? 
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I tell him in the hospital again 
but he can’t hear me because the sedative and the new doctor
is asking me can a student insert a long needle 
into his spinal column, would that be OK?
I look out the window and there’s plants, a garden.
Our nurse comes in, says, There’s another garden
on the roof. You can go look. Just don’t jump off.
The story is a circle that repeats, a round,
the voices overlapping. He’s in my arms again
my baby, my baby, I am singing to him.
I kiss his cheek, his hair. And now he’s not thirteen. 
He’s not anything. The nurse has left and I’m alone.
On the ceiling is a lake, a field of flowers.
Let’s try this again, I say to no one. Can you see me?
I’m still here. I’m lying on the table, looking up.

—from Rattle #72, Summer 2021

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Danusha Laméris: “I write because I am trying to get closer and closer to the marrow of it, whatever the It might be. I write to try and find order in chaos. And sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I do.” (web)

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February 21, 2020

“Twin Strangers” by Danusha LamérisPosted by

Danusha Laméris

TWIN STRANGERS

For $3.99, the website promises me the opportunity
to find my duplicate, my doppelgänger,
my double. Someone half-way around the world,
or right next door, who wears the same pointed eyebrows,
aquiline (according to the diagram) nose
on a brown and almost-oval face. “Everyone,” they say
“has seven look-alikes.” Each night in bed
I sip my cup of tea and try to forget
life’s many terrible subtractions—all the people
I’ve loved and can’t replace—while scrolling through photos
of people I don’t even know, searching for any trace
of likeness—matching earlobes, sprigs of hair,
the errant mole. Becoming a connoisseur
of countenances, every face an alphabet
arranged in its own language. So that even
at the market, cruising the aisles,
I take an inventory of eyelids, cheek bones, chins,
our species a pared to replicable parts—
the same ones they’ve been doling out
for centuries. Each grief seems so unique,
my losses mine, alone. And yet—O phantom sister,
mirror other—look how the world repeats
its pocketful of tricks: brow bone,
occipital, cupid’s bow. Broken heart,
chipped soul. Wherever you are, I am thinking
of you, out there in your several guises,
carrying your own piece of the burden,
one seventh of our common woe.

—from Rattle #66, Winter 2019

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Danusha Laméris: “In the spring of my senior year of high school, a poet by the name of Tony Hoagland came to teach a week-long class for me and about five other aspiring writers. I didn’t know poetry could be so unlike the classics and yet have such an effect on me. It opened up a world I hadn’t even imagined. As for my twin stranger, I found one. She’s in Berlin. I may send her this poem.” (web)

 

Danusha Laméris is the guest on Rattlecast #40! Click here to watch …

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July 18, 2013

“Arabic” by Danusha LamérisPosted by

Danusha Laméris

ARABIC

I don’t remember the sounds
rising from below my breastbone
though I spoke that golden language
with the girls of Beirut, playing hopscotch
on the hot asphalt. We called out to our mothers
for lemonade, and when the men
walking home from work stooped down,
slipped us coins for candy, we thanked them.
At the market, I understood the bargaining
of the butcher, the vendors of fig and bread.
In Arabic, I whispered into the tufted ears
of a donkey, professing my love. And in Arabic
I sang at school, or dreamt at night.
There is an Arab saying,
Sad are only those who understand.
What did I know then of the endless trail
of losses? In the years that have passed,
I’ve buried a lover, a brother, a son.
At night, the low drumroll
of bombs eroded the edges of the city.
The girls? Who knows what has been taken
from them.

For a brief season I woke
to a man who would whisper to me
in Arabic, then tap the valley of my sternum,
ask me to repeat each word,
coaxing the rusty syllables from my throat.
See, he said, they’re still here.
Though even that memory is faint.
And maybe he was right. What’s gone
is not quite gone, but lingers.
Not the language, but the bones
of the language. Not the beloved,
but the dark bed the beloved makes
inside our bodies.

—from Rattle #38, Winter 2012

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Danusha Laméris: “I’ve been thinking a lot about how languages are worlds and how we’re defined by the ones we’re born into. My niece is growing up speaking English, Russian and Spanish (her parents’ languages) at home. Not speaking a language can be a kind of exile. I never learned Dutch, my father’s language. When I speak Spanish with my husband I know a different side of him. This poem is my little hymn to Arabic.”

 

Danusha Laméris is the guest on Rattlecast #40! Click here to watch …

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January 13, 2010

“The Lord God Bird” by Danusha LamérisPosted by

Danusha Laméris

THE LORD GOD BIRD

Sixty-two years since the last sighting,
ornithologists say they’ve spotted one
somewhere along the lip of the White River,
its pale beak, red crest, black and white featured tuxedo,
the last of the ivory-billed woodpeckers.
Could it be, they wonder
that the birds have gone deeper,
nested in the southern bottomland?
People kept killing them
to show in museums
nailing their bodies to planks.
Now the town is buzzing with tourists
armed with binoculars.
Isn’t this how it is? We want back
what we’ve taken, the way a child tries
to set the head back on a doll.
Jesus risen in white robes,
standing outside the door to his grave,
Houdini underwater, escaping the chained suitcase.
We want to know there is something
more powerful than destruction
so we destroy what we desire:
the lithe and fearsome tiger,
humans adorned in feathers and the skins of bison,
entire forests, quiet as cathedrals.
And then we want it back,
that thin strip of green, lush again,
the Lord God bird, as it was known
set back on its branch,
scaling bald patches into the rough bark.

—from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets

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Danusha Laméris: I was introduced to the world of poets on Dover Beach in Barbados by her grandfather, writer Gordon Bell. I remember walking alongside him and his friends as they recited aloud, talked and laughed, their feet skimming the white sand. What other life?” (website)

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