Absence of reliable ghosts sets text from Divya Victor's poem, “Threshold,” in which a speaker narrates her physical reactions to hearing the news of the shooting of Srinivas Kuchibhotla on February 22, 2017, by a white supremacist who believed Kuchibhotla to be an illegal immigrant. On this day, the speaker is pregnant and moving into her third trimester, just as I was when I first read the poem in 2020 during global anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd. Sections of the poem move through different perspectives on the experience of hearing of the shooting, from the fetus and her development to the distortions of the pregnant and traumatized body, interacting with histories of immigration deterrence, and the fear of the same violence enacted against the speaker’s father and yet unborn child. The title of the piece comes from an epigraph from Meena Alexander that begins the poem: “In the absence of reliable ghosts I made aria.”
— Carolyn Chen
by Divya Victor
1.
I had been carrying her
six months. Within
me, she could open
her eyes, she could tell
dark apart from light. She could know when daylight filtered
through the cathedral, a ray breaking the sticky pane
cranberry stained
glass womb.
2.
When I read the news
of the shooting, this belly
plumed into an apse— it distended upward, a balloon hollow
but leaden, these lungs lifted
here—this diaphragm fled, bore through
a tent made of ligament
& rope. The billow screeched
in these ears, pulled here— these legs apart these toes went numb & cold. The ground beneath me collapsed, turned to dunes
& the sand quickened. Here— this belly carrying those pounds of flesh
began to take flight
in seconds it was
in – here— this mouth, pressing against here— these teeth— a pear balloon, hot flush
with wet wings beating, with wet wings thrashing
in these lungs. The breath
an ocean of blood. This skin
here—a dam, detonating. A pulse, here
pulling history
towards these feet.
3.
When I read the news
of the shooting, I was standing
in our library & this— here— this face fell
into a hundred sheets
sheaves of visas lost in monsoon floods
a long queue dispersing after bad news
passes through breath & beard
a susurrus of shaking heads, shrugged shoulders;
this— here— this face fell
apart in the quiet hum of the air-conditioning
soft surplice, lisping off me, the bone simply giving way the skin curling back, the cartilage of this nose spilling
a bib over this— here— pale nightshirt.
I needed this face
to stay; I wanted
this face to flee
to abandon me the way rats do ships to stave off a starvation by drinking water
to make it to any shore, baby in mouth. I needed this — here—face because it was on my visa.
I gathered it up— these knuckles
driftwood; these palms
sailcloth. These finger-tips
branched apart; each phalange dangled
—cheap pens at the mall’s Western Union
chained & paranoid about being taken elsewhere. The nails scratched the deck & that sound
drowned the sough of crowds
migrating within one.
4.
When I read the news
of the shooting, it was warm & bright outside
the cumin spun into rasam, the curds set just right, I called my mother, it was dark & cold
where the news stained first, where the choke cleared brushwood for a pyre where she was. I called out
to my husband; I thought about my father
but I did not call him.
5.
When I read the news
of the shooting, the blowback
was a flight from the fear of ever seeing
a photograph
of my father’s rib shattered, his blood
staining the pocket of his faded navy pique polo—
\the one he wears on Costco runs for bananas
& two-packs of Windex.
was a flight towards the pale band of skin on his wrist, where he keeps time—
how he looks older, more lost
when it isn’t hidden by his watch—
I pocketed this band for the alms I would offer myself
as I begged, in the months to come, for a place
on a curb not wet with blood, of a question not always cocked I remembered my father’s future
as a passport-photo hung from an elm tree
as a headline
as a statistic gently rolling on a marquee.
That brown face, a stain between kin & ken
between breech & brotherhood on a floor near the boots
of citizens, Americans, men.
8.
When I read the news, the she in me was swollen & pressing, & I saw her dropping to kneel her
brown belly
collapsed to a city’s curb
her skull crimson in the clouds
her sweet ear flung & clinging to a parapet. & at that cleft
for the first time, I saw —here—
her as mine & then, hearing canons sung in double-time
I knew being mine
would clip her life. So, I slipped this burning hand
into a place
where this body hammers at its heart
& I singed its edges & with shame I scorched a hole into the photograph
of an ancestor, blotted her dark
eyes out to whiteness, charred
her skin to a pale ash, turned
her folded hands into smoke, & I looked within this—here –belly
for those eyes that could tell
dark apart from light, & I wished
out loud
so she could survive—
live, I said,
in any skin, live.
February 22, 2017. Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot in a bar in Olathe, Kansas, by Adam Purinton, a white supremacist who believed that Kuchibhotla was an illegal immigrant from Iran. The shooter yelled, “Get out of my country!” before he shot & murdered Srinivas. Then, the shooter went to another local bar & bragged that he had shot an immigrant.
On that day, I was pregnant & moving into my third trimester.