Hymn to Asafoetida

To the chalky
yellow sand-stuff
that lived in my
mother’s palm
when I asked her,
how do I stoke
the hearth
burning in my belly? To that

roiling flavor
which simmered
sweet and fat-fried
on my mother’s
tongue, To that
sizzling melody
along the insides
of chilis, crackling breath

filling me with
roots, refusing to unfold
fetid resin in English’s
mouth, that aromatic
pinch moving
only in human
hands, too sharp
to translate, too cruel

to travel, too ethnic
for the Ethnic
aisle: Hymn
to hing, hymn
to home, hymn
to Hindi singing
in a yellow
plastic pot.

* * *

Waiting for Kalki

Ages come and come and
the age will come where it is no longer
seemly
to sleep on a floor sparsely beaded
with carpet, dine from a box unfolding
with vestiges. Wake tethered only
by this man who hungers
for me; watch my eyes hollowed
with kajal in the fogging mirror. The age
will come when I cannot find sanctuary
in the weft of his hip bones, his eyelashes
streaming richly down sunlit skin. But
Lord—
in this the Kaliyuga
my skin is supple
and I draw dancing to the magnets
under his skin. His ribs lined
with the warmth of the earth,
his face a congregation
of waterfalls. His body, a garden, his body,
a graveyard
his hair a winter bloom of black.

* * *

Sagaree Jain is an aspiring poet, scholar, organizer, and thinker with a degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied gender, race, post-coloniality, and South Asia. Sagaree works to spotlight queer South Asian art and healing as the co-creator of The Turmeric Project. She works at Human Rights Watch and tweets at @sagareejain.