I Tell My Lecturer I Write Poems And She Insists I Talk

Janiru Liyanage

to the only brown resident writer in the department, who writes essays on
South-Asian writers who write about immigration and war. She says
that she’s sure I write about the same kind of things and that we’d have a lot 

to talk about. She’s right, of course. I have, I do, write about the
same kind of things–– war, yes, and families split by seas cracking
like රතිඤ්ඤා on අවුරුදු –– aren’t those the words you wanted? 

And does it matter that the resident writer has never lived in
my country? Or that I haven’t wanted to write about war or
“my people” or the dead for a long time, because the last thing I want 

is to offend the dead. Or that sometimes I wish I could write about the dead in my poems
without the usual empires, rattling behind them. That sometimes I wish I could say
I miss the conqueror and not mean it for their empire, but for 

the fact that they had been here all my life and one day they weren’t and I didn’t know
what that meant for my life ahead, like a snake sabering its way through silt for miles,
suddenly finding a river. Sometimes I wish I could write about a river without some boy’s 

lonely bones plinking and plinking away beneath the bank. Context looms over
your scalp the way Grandad would bend over yours, spit-comb your cowlick into a slick arrow
that’d slowly curl into an even tighter coil as the day went on. Sometimes I wish I could write 

about my mother, my brother, and my father without the war that made them.
Or a poem about the first time my father and I saw snow after leaving our country,
how he called the field furyfied when he meant purified, without having to bring up 

the months he spent in front of the mirror, working at his consonants and softening
his jaw; its new English like clay. Sometimes all I want is my mother pouring curry
into my bowl without remembering her vertigo-stunned hands, trembling in the half-light, 

or the clot that used to hum in her good lung; she’s singing again, in the kitchen. Fine, no more
home-made, mother-made curry–– we’re eating out instead. Get in. I’m paying.
Plug in your aux, turn up every song I lied about having never listened to–– it’s all of 

Madonna’s discography, with Material Girl and Vogue repeated three times.
We’re driving to the restaurant beneath the overpass two blocks away, with sterile fluorescents
buzzing overhead and the owner’s son running the front desk while a pile of his homework 

echoes behind him so you know it’s the real deal. We’ll split a tikka masala, and no,
I don’t want to hear how tikka masala is in fact a British or Scottish dish because
it was invented in Glasgow, even if it’s credited to a Pakistani chef. No, I don’t want to 

comb through the Twitter threads you’ll bring up comparing the dish to TexMex and
Neo-Colonial appropriation. I just want to sit in this restaurant, watch the beautiful
waiter pour curry over this one bowl of basmati rice; their teeth so white I’ll write a poem 

about it and call them glaciers or a field of furyfied snow or a page I could write my name over––
maybe metaphor their molars into jewels, and not once mention the ones crowning
the conquerors’ skulls, plinking away beneath the dirt. And no, I don’t want to hear 

my Uncle, pot-bellied and hennessy-sour, go on and on about the trillions
taken from the Subcontinent, or how Sri Lanka could be so much better
if it weren’t for the Portuguese. I just want us, at this 

sad Indian restaurant, sitting together, eating from the same bowl.
I just want your teeth, 

beautiful as diamonds, in front of me––
the small cave of your mouth I’ll cut open with mine.