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Tishani Doshi, from A God at the Door; “Survival”

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Love Poem

by Tishani Doshi

Ultimately, we will lose each other to something. I would hope for grand circumstance – death or disaster. But it might not be that way at all. It might be that you walk out one morning after making love to buy cigarettes, and never return, or I fall in love with another man. It might be a slow drift into indifference. Either way, we’ll have to learn to bear the weight of the eventuality that we will lose each other to something. So why not begin now, while your head rests like a perfect moon in my lap, and the dogs on the beach are howling? Why not reach for the seam in this South Indian night and tear it, just a little, so the falling can begin? Because later, when we cross each other on the streets, and are forced to look away, when we’ve thrown the disregarded pieces of our togetherness into bedroom drawers and the smell of our bodies is disappearing like the sweet decay of lilies – what will we call it, when it’s no longer love?

#poetry #tishani doshi #love poem

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Tishani Doshi

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a (tumultuous) new year

been having a lot of emotions about the new year and everything going on in the world and the idea that i am stuck (i am literally 23 but my brain is like you're practically in the grave) and my personal life. you have to remind yourself that it is never too late to start. a new year can start any day.

They Killed Cows. I Killed Them.

In the future we might all be vegetarian, and this life will seem barbaric the way a corset was or eugenics. We might look at this man being secretly recorded, bragging, They killed cows, I killed them, and wonder, where was his mother? She might have spoken of his childhood, how it was poor but decent, how like that blue god’s mother she too gaped into her son’s wide gob and saw the universe once. Or she might have told the story of how he was led astray by a band of men in uniforms. Not brownshirts but pleated brownshorts in which they practiced ideological calisthenics. How she’s been standing at the crater’s edge saying, Here, kitty kitty kitty, ever since. Because this man, her son in the undershirt, dear cadre, cow vigilante, he’s no gladiolus. He sighs. Even his mustache is pusillanimous. Maybe he was a Romeo in school. Maybe he wields this stick to reclaim what he misses most about his body, or maybe it’s always been his dream to squeeze the messy limbs of this country into a svelte operatic shriek. The camera gives us a glimpse of his chin dumpling. He will go to jail a thousand times without passing go, without stopping to plant a tree or collect clean underwear. He admits it was wrong to allow his boys to record the killing. Jai Shri Ram. Silly to leave evidence behind, even though they always go free, even though the young lads enjoy it so. And Qasim? The man they killed, the green meadow of his life come to this, didn’t his mother also once confuse the dirt in his mouth for a galaxy? Didn’t he believe a dying man had the right to ask for water? In the future when people complain about how Gandhi should have made a comeback, when comparisons are drawn between YouTube and the Upanishads, will they notice the bystanders in the frame, their shabby shoes shuffling like lapwings around the bloody censored blur of Qasim’s body? Will they speak of the difficulty of watching him thrash around for an invisible rope to steady him home, the difficulty of us watching them watching him being killed? Or is that an illusion too? The way a magician might swirl his cape to reveal his assistant is really a robot. No damage done here, folks! The way we enter the rooms of our past like gunshots to say, Surprise, I’m still here. No point carrying blossoms in your pocket instead of a meat sandwich. Because even if you did not walk the earth exultantly, even if you avoided disposable plates and mourned every glacier and strung a lattice of pearls to the giant monument of love, there might still come a day when you are hauling refrigerators on a truck, or taking the children to a fair, and when death arrives you must let him strap you to a telephone pole, you must look into his ten-headed face, and say, Flay, brother, flay.

Tishani Doshi Poetry, April 2020

#poetry #national poetry month #tishani doshi #lynching tw

national poetry month, day 2

The Brainfever Bird, Confused by Seasons

i.m. John Burnside keeps waking me, even though it’s nowhere near monsoon. At two in the morning, and for every hour after, the trees brim with its cooing. None of it sounds like, Where are you, my love? The rains are coming. Dear son, sister, where are you? My eyes are gone. Instead, a fierce insistence that the beyond will break through the present, the way darkness fringes around the house, making our dogs bark in confusion. The whole night charged like a hymn of warning. At dawn I expect to see a small dead creature laid at our door—a symbol of the crescendo of losses to come. Time’s hidden kingdom. But there is nothing. Unless you count the go away come back whispers through fronds of palmyra, the stalled clock on the kitchen wall. It’s too easy to say, I’m here, you’re here, what are we making of it? But, oh, moonlight! Oh, drowning! That we have a voice at all. —Tishani Doshi

#tishani doshi #the brainfever bird confused by seasons #poetry #national poetry month #npm2026 #this one's for my senile elderdog who sometimes barks to be let outside at 2am and every hour after. i love her so much

Poetry isn’t benign. It can break you. For National Poetry Month:

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods BY TISHANI DOSHI for Monika Girls are coming out of the woods, wrapped in cloaks and hoods, carrying iron bars and candles and a multitude of scars, collected on acres of premature grass and city buses, in temples and bars. Girls are coming out of the woods with panties tied around their lips, making such a noise, it's impossible to hear. Is the world speaking too? Is it really asking, What does it mean to give someone a proper resting? Girls are coming out of the woods, lifting their broken legs high, leaking secrets from unfastened thighs, all the lies whispered by strangers and swimming coaches, and uncles, especially uncles, who said spreading would be light and easy, who put bullets in their chests and fed their pretty faces to fire, who sucked the mud clean off their ribs, and decorated their coffins with briar. Girls are coming out of the woods, clearing the ground to scatter their stories. Even those girls found naked in ditches and wells, those forgotten in neglected attics, and buried in river beds like sediments from a different century. They've crawled their way out from behind curtains of childhood, the silver-pink weight of their bodies pushing against water, against the sad, feathered tarnish of remembrance. Girls are coming out of the woods the way birds arrive at morning windows—pecking and humming, until all you can hear is the smash of their miniscule hearts against glass, the bright desperation of sound—bashing, disappearing. Girls are coming out of the woods. They're coming. They're coming.