Salonee Verma
Salonee Verma is a Jharkhandi-American writer and the co-founder of antinarrative (@antinarrativeZ), a collaborative zine. Her work is published or is forthcoming in the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, GASHER, Shenandoah, Carousel, VIBE, and more. He has been nominated thrice for the Pushcart Prize, once for the American Voices medal, and is a Graybeal-Gowen Award finalist. Find her online at saloneeverma.carrd.co.
(ABECEDARIAN FOR THE COLOR BLUE OR THE LACK OF IT)
All your life you’ve been waiting for something
beautiful, tied up in a fucking ribbon. Levittown was the ideal of
conformity & you want that, sometimes, when you’re lying awake & thinking about
dying young. When you were two, you called
elephants something other than their name. Something beautiful, something
finnicky. Your mother was the only one who took the
golden time to understand you. Baby, here’s what has to
happen: there will be a bell & then a moment where you have to
Inhabit the space. Revel in it. Seize the
jubilee in your palms & let it rot there, waiting for the
Korean market down the street to grow wings &
lift off into the wine-dark sky. Did you know that before
modernity, the sky wasn’t even blue? Some languages were in
need of a word for the great big blueness of the sky,
of the ocean, of the last berries on the mulberry tree, dark &
plump & bursting. Even the ones that had a word were
MICRODOSING PROPHECY FROM THE WATER
It’s the end of the world & I am teaching
my money plant to suckle water from its
roots like a child learning milk at birth.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,
the moon slamming closer to Earth all
of a sudden, as if it didn’t know its place
in the order of things. It was supposed
to be a drought. I kept my water in a
bucket from Home Depot hidden deep
inside the icebox. J told me I was being
a doomsayer & instead, I told her about
the poet-saints who thought they knew
everything. What a bunch of assholes.
They couldn’t predict the tides rising
into another dance of flood and ebb
if they tried. J said that we should get
married. You know, because it was the
end of the world & maybe that was a sign
that we were supposed to make it out
together. Okay, I said. Okay. We wrote
out our vows on the backs of our wrists
with Sharpies so expired we felt high from
the scent. The money plant stood witness
after we taught it to drink again. J told me
that the reason the ocean was salty was
to preserve it. So we poured seven boxes
of kosher salt into our bathtub & lay there
together. How’s that for a wedding night?
Gorgeous girls hunkered in a bathtub
at the bottom of the church while the
oceans boil & burn. J says that we’ll name
the money plant after a messiah but I told
her we need to think creatively if we’re going
to survive this. We named the plant Matsya
& taught it to swim like a snapper. Keep the
family close. Learn to game the apocalypse.
SOUR SUMMER
In another universe, I collect folklorists instead of numbers.
At my birth, I was crying something fierce & acting something
like a Scythian lamb. A shitty reincarnation of the esteemed
Vegetable Lamb of Tartary turned bidepal. Placenta as a stem
from a navel, shot through with a kitchen knife before the night
was over. They say that lamb-trees only survive as long as
the grass around them stays free from consumption. My mother
never planted me, but she planted other things, like climbing vines
of bittermelon in the hot Virginia sun. We had long beans to spare
when California stopped sending their crop over. Sometimes she
invited me into the garden, but the minute I stepped on the grass,
I got hives. Probably for the best. If I had touched soil barefoot,
there’s no telling how fast I might’ve taken root. Like a natal plum,
but half as pretty & triple the blood. Heating up on the spit of
summer, close enough to burn but far enough to roast. In this
other universe, I move mountains with the pads of my fingers,
like the other boy-monkey who had a mother like mine, holy &
covered in Earth. Loosely based on the human race, but only
half as new. A secret: the vines climbed into kerosene this
summer. I’m trying to learn to unfurl leaves but the grass is
running dry in the sun—flaky & beached & trying to grow.