Previous Issue: Fall/Winter 2009

Jackfruit  
Dilruba Ahmed

for my mother
 
It’s taken so long to come home. Skin sliced
in your sister’s kitchen, the stink and burst
of flesh, something sweet but dank
 
with time. The open wound spills.
We bite giant prawns that glow pink
on our plates, then climb to rooftop views:
 
crooked buildings, Dhaka’s jagged
teeth. Bikes churn up dust from beneath,
and I feel a great coil unwinding.
 
Snake-charmed, mesmerized. I chant
my cousins’ names as a spell or charm:
Ushmeela. Rashed. Ivy. The gems
 
of small nieces a nursery rhyme:
Annono, Lavonno, Mo. They paint
looping patterns onto my hands,
 
maroon veins of mehndi—
tubes of marrow, or blood.
And you, cocooned in your sari
 
all this time. We lean by potted sprigs
of henna, cool our feet on cement.
Uncles bring lemonade, tell stories
 
of the skyline and smoke cigarettes.
Your sister refused to leave,
so the city piles its bricks
 
at the base of her door: industry,
haze, noise. Through traffic-lava,
flats of pipes and giant bolts
 
twist by on rickshaw floats.
The vendor’s call for shrimp fish
is a cry of jubilation, ricocheting
 
through mud and stone.
For this while, we are shirts
on a clothesline: clean, dry, free.
 
We toss roasted peanuts
as hot in our palms as those
sold on the Jersey coast, the ones
 
you’ll still drive hours
to eat. You say they
taste better by the sea.

Dilruba Ahmed’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, The Cream City Review, New England Review, and New Orleans Review. Her work is forthcoming Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. She received first place for The Florida Review’s 2006 Editors’ Award.