Poetry — April 30, 2012 12:58 — 1 Comment

Garden Song – Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Knives. Your children are coming to dinner
all clamor and grab, faces ticking with greed

like teeth left fastened too long in the head.

Left untended, your mind’s gone maggoty,
rotted like the cold center of a plum. Hungry

in the head, rows of unpolished spoons.

They’ve hired a woman to haunt the hallway,
fetch the bone china. Left as a tribulation

when you die, the chard will run rampant.

Unhemmed, the bean rows will loosen
like old muscles in the mouth, come

undone in the garden’s thistled heart.

Bio:

Mia Ayumi Malhotra lives in Seattle and is an acting instructor in the UW Creative Writing Program.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as diode, Cerise Press, The Asian American Literary Review and Cha.  She currently serves as the associate editor of the online literary magazine Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry.

*Featured image by Kimberly Trowbridge

One Comment

  1. Johnny Debt says:

    This post Garden Song – Mia Ayumi Malhotra — The Monarch Review was a good read so I posted it on my Facebook to hopefully give you more readers. thanks. Johnny Debt

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What am I?

Bioluminescent eye
That sees by the shine
Of its own light. Lies

Blind me. I am the seventh human sense
And my stepchild,
Consequence;

Scientists can't find me.

Januswise I make us men;
Glamour
Was my image then—

Remind me:

The awful fall up off all fours
From the forest
To the hours…

Tick, Tock: Divine me.

-- Richard Kenney