Tag: Amit Majmudar

ONE ART’s April Reading with Featured Poets: Kari Gunter-Seymour, Amit Majmudar, Chad Frame

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ONE ART’s April Reading with Featured Poets: Kari Gunter-Seymour, Amit Majmudar, Chad Frame

Date: Sunday, April 6

Time: 2pm Eastern

Featured Poets: Kari Gunter-Seymour, Amit Majmudar, Chad Frame

Tickets: Free or Donation

~ About The Featured Poets ~

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, including Dirt Songs (EastOver Press 2024) and Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press 2022). She is the Executive Director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series Women Speak, and the host of “Spoken & Heard” a seasonal reading series featuring poets, writers and singer/songwriters from throughout the country. Her work has been featured in a number of periodicals and journals including the American Book Review, Poem-a-Day, World Literature Today and The New York Times. Find her at www.karigunterseymourpoet.com.

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Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and the poetry collection Things my Grandmother Said (Knopf, 2026). More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

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Chad Frame is the author of three books of poetry: Little Black Book, Cryptid, and Smoking Shelter. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry/improv performance troupe, and the founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival. His work appears in Rattle, Strange Horizons, Pedestal, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, on iTunes from the Library of Congress, and is archived on the moon with The Lunar Codex.

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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Harpsichords

Hollowed-out shoulderblade
of a musical pterodactyl,

strung with strings of gut.

The fingers touch
like blind twins in adjacent gestational sacs
learning the face of their captivity.

You, with your flight of ideas—
isn’t language, for you,
a ten-ton tungsten harpsichord?

Angelically ungainly, swung
absurdly through closing subway doors,

or propped beside your place at Starbucks
in the way of anybody
trying to get to the restroom,

or angled into a back seat
to block the rear view mirror
of anyone
who’s ever given you a ride….

how can they know how dear it is to you?

You’ve drawn its every gut string out yourself,
clenched teeth, blue pills, hours of hissing—

your navel still bleeds sometimes.

What do the doctors know of verbal labor,
of gulped-down decibels of childbirth?

Every so often,
you leap off a cliff
with harpsichords
taped to your flapping arms.

Metaphors, like the long bones, so hollow
gravity can whistle through them.

You were born a pterodactyl—
you, with your winged words.

These gut strings, heart strings, living
wires that electrocute you
feel alive to no one else.

This world is an observation unit,
and you’re on the hospital roof—

IV pole your prophet’s staff,
your gown of glory
open at the back.

*

Not To Exceed 5 Doses in 24 Hours

Shaking out a chewable pink pill for my daughter’s fever,
I thought again about the other girl
whose stepdad took her to the basement
and tied a rope around her neck and tied
the other end around a crossbeam.
He entered standing up, his hands behind his back.
She had to cling to him because she knew
if she let go she would fall and
hang herself. It turned him on, how she clung to him.
She was ten when it happened. She was fourteen
when I did her intake interview
on my Child and Adolescent Psych rotation.
She had emptied a childproof bottle of pills
over the hollow in herself
at the fairy tale stroke of midnight.
This was a yearly thing for her.
“One of these times,” she said, “I’ll get it right. These pills,
they’re supposed to kill
pain, aren’t they? One of these times they’ll kill
what they’re supposed to kill.”

*

Twin-Twin Transfusion

My brother redrew the lines on his palm
with an X-acto knife.
Shaved his right eyebrow, shaved
lightning zigzags into his buzzcut temples.
Pierced the nipples that would give
blood but not milk.
Headphones jackhammered the pavement
of his birth body
to reveal an underground city
where he was secretly a native.
I think about him sometimes, I wonder
about the underground scene.
We never hear from him.
He moved there at seventeen
tossing fifty Valium
into the tollbooth coin basket
as he gunned his body home.
He went to war with his birth.
I know how I must seem to you
with my side part and my three kids,
but I had a twin brother whose bunk
lay empty every couple months
while he slept with gravewrapped forearms
in the child and adolescent psych unit downtown.
Excuse my double knotted shoelaces
and my model-minority smile,
but my temples ache when I remember him.
My palm lines tingle and turn to ants
carrying all the sweetness out of my life.
I hold the dripping razor
to my eyebrow,
daring him to grip my wrist and guide it.

*

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and the poetry collection Things my Grandmother Said (Knopf, 2026). More information at www.amitmajmudar.com

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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Niju Hibakusha
Tsutomu Yamaguchi makes shadow puppets on the wall for his first daughter.
Hare, butterfly, dog. Airplane.
Sole vestige of the bicycle: the bicycle’s negative image
branded on the pavement. The rider, too, tattooed there:
Twin dharma wheels, spokes pickled in ink.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived Hiroshima in a silk skin sleeve and rode a bicycle
to report for work three days later
in Nagasaki.
In a wooden house, a catshaped blind spot floated across a paper wall
in the nanosecond before the shockwave spotlit her leap.
Heavy water shivered a teakettle.
Locomotive-steam incense appeased a valley.
Nagasaki whistled, twisting oblivious wisteria into her hair.
Black rain thick as hot tar pocked constellations onto Tsutomu Yamaguchi’s bandages,
inverted chart of stars that survived hydrogen fusion.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi inks a book of poems years after his hair grows back blacker
than the week he watched two earthborne stars crown,
blast crater follicles seeded each with the shadows of hairs that grew there once.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi feeds his second daughter with a spoon.
He makes airplane noises.
Outside, on the street: a bicycle’s thumb bell.
Tinnitus calling the kami to come.
Uranium, polonium, chrysanthemum.
In Hiroshima, after the plane passed overhead, he looked up
and, seeing a parachute open,
mistook in the nanosecond before the blast exposes his flesh like photographic film
Little Boy for an American paratrooper.
I hoped he would land without breaking his legs. But also that he would be promptly caught.
He vomited intestinal mucosa like inside-out snakeskin.
Burns, cataracts. If you count the leukemia, a triple survivor.
A malignant nucleus divides too wildly, setting off a chain reaction.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi vomits black tar once again, his stomach snakesloughing itself
in his granddaughter’s house
in a rhyme that hints at the cyclicity of time, the circular reasoning
of should we or shouldn’t we drop it.
Wheel of dharma. Centrifuge of dharma.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi at five years old learned to ride a bicycle.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi is teaching his granddaughter to ride a bicycle
in Nagasaki
in early August.
The dark urns of the clouds glow with rain. He looks up.
Thunder detonates, and a drop of rain targets the back of his hand.
And now a second drop. His mother
his grown daughter
his granddaughter calls to him, calls him indoors
to a concrete roof and walls of graph paper
inked, tattooed, branded with calculations of yield.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, fissioning into all his ages all at once,
shuts his eyes with their spokewheel irises.
Come in, grandfather.
He sees the black shadow of sight branded long ago on the insides of his eyelids.
Come in, son.
His eyelids never glow red anymore, not even when he faces the rising sun.
Come in from the black rain, father. Your memory has had decades to heal.
Wipe the black tar from the corner of your mouth.
Peel the snakeskin gauze from your burn.
*
Vibration
All things shiver, but some things shiver
more than others, shiver
with a tapped tuning fork’s
whole-body blur, like mountain ranges and desert
heat shimmers and psychedelic fires recognized
early on as sacred, our watering eyes
coated with a natural lacrimal
lens to let us see the shivering
in real time, that ringing in the ears
complained of in a doctor’s office
just the ossicles and eardrum catching some
cosmic engine-hum,
and that spotted knobby-knuckled hand
held out for inspection, stubbornly
wobbly, benign essential tremor,
or restless legs syndrome, the legs kicking
and twitching like a dreaming dog’s,
no cure for these things, sorry, it comes with age,
comes at the end, the skeleton
unstiffened, holding fast against the godgust
no longer, that leaflike
shaking honest for once about the approach
of death, no more faux-yogic
“stillness,” no, the teeth chatter in June,
knees knock, lips quiver
until the frequency speeds up,
the whole body blurs, and two elderly forked creatures
embrace, wife and husband desperate to stop
their cold bones, bodies pinched together
like breath-ruffled vocal cords
around a single word,
unless the shiver
catches her alone after midnight
on the threshold between bedroom and bathroom
where, standing on tiptoe, she floats
until her body’s plucked guitar string finishes its note.
*
Karma
She doesn’t have a dozen borzois
to thread the fog. No horse, no horn—
But her footfalls make the foxes go
as pale as hares, reborn.
She’s never flushed and shot a pheasant,
much less a weasel sinner.
No skinning knife, no kind of kit.
But she’s still got meat for dinner.
Of course, you’ll never see her coming.
But if you did, you’d find
a woman whistling to herself
with meadows on her mind—
a birder, maybe, thrilled by a finch,
by cobwebs jeweled with dew.
But don’t be fooled by her casual shoes.
She’s out here hunting you.
*
Amit Majmudar’s new books in 2023 include Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books) as well as Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books).

Three Poems by Amit Majmudar

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The Opening

Open them up and they’re never the same,
the neurosurgeon said that afternoon
I watched him suction bloodclot from a skull.
A forty-three-year-old swan dove head first
into a barfight. I remember thinking
about trepanning, Neolithic skulls
with round skylights—nobody knows if those were cut
to let depression out or visions in.
The Druids tapped themselves like trees for syrup
and wore their own bone-coins as charms. All newborns
have soft spots where the skull has not iced over,
a fishing-hole ancestral spirits sit around,
ghostgusts of breath that swirl clockwise, down,
and in. I’m forty-three years old as I
am writing this. I’m still swan diving head first
into a love that opens like a coin-sized
locket of bone that holds my mind inside it.
Emily Dickinson knew poetry
by how the top of her head felt taken off—
poet as neurosurgeon, bone saw kissing
a crisp horizon just above the eyebrows,
pale recluse squinting up at cold white light.
Everyone has a pond inside that’s frozen
bone white, and love’s the only way to swan dive
heart first into the future. Through that hole
the spirits swirl down and in to help
unlock the waterfalls. You melt to slake them.
The pond becomes a lake becomes a sea, adrift
on its breathing, open in every direction.

*

Matriarchy

I like my religions founderless,
theologianless, commandmentless.
The fewer men in flowing robes, the better.
Best would be grandmothers, lighting incense
in front of the trees their grandmothers planted
and timing their fasts to the moon.
Turmeric on everything from food
to flesh wounds. Smudges of kohl
on baby’s cheek to divert the evil eye.
That gives me sacred awe, the mystery
mastered by knobby-fingered knowhow
that aches when it rains. All the inexplicables
stay unexplained, but all the rites
stay right. The wisdom of the forest
gave way to the wisdom of the desert,
but the wisdom of the kitchen
butters the loaves and fries up the fishes
and makes sure everyone takes seconds.
There is no talk of hell or holy war,
just grandmothers circulating like blood cells
through the capillaries of the cosmos
assuring everyone there’s more, there’s more.

*

State of Being

Between O and O
is a lowercase high,
a quick hello.
Our lives here jump
out of a manhole
into a manhole
on a street with no street
signs. I have spooned
the local honey
and failed to taste a difference.
I have rummaged
among the blotchy fruits
at farmer’s markets.
Forgive me, Ohio,
but apples genespliced in Wisconsin
trucked in from Michigan
glisteny with wax and pesticide
in artificial light
have always pleased me more.
I have never really lived here
after living here
my whole life.
In Rootstown mine was not the root.
In Mayfield mine was not the flower.
My hole of a life, Ohio,
has emptied through you.
I have been places
I would never want to live
and lived
in a place I never wanted to be.
I have never been
a place I did not want
to leave.
I do not want to leave
a place
I never loved.

*

Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children.

Majmudar’s poetry collections include 0’, 0’ (Northwestern, 2009), shortlisted for the Norma Faber First Book Award, and Heaven and Earth (2011, Storyline Press), which won the Donald Justice Prize. These volumes were followed by Dothead (Knopf, 2016) and What He Did in Solitary (Knopf, 2020). His poems have won the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature, The New Yorker, and numerous Best American Poetry anthologies as well as journals and magazines across the United States, UK, India, and Australia. Majmudar also edited, at Knopf’s invitation, a political poetry anthology entitled Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now.

Majmudar’s forthcoming collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, April 2023). Twin A: A Life (Slant Books, May 2023) is the title of his forthcoming memoir, in prose and verse, about his infant son’s congenital heart disease. The first volume of his epic retelling, The Mahabharata Trilogy, is entitled The Book of Vows (Penguin India, September 2023). His work as a translator includes Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (Knopf, 2018).

ONE ART’s nominations for Best Spiritual Literature

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~ ONE ART’s nominations for Orison Book’s Best Spiritual Literature (formerly The Orison Anthology) ~ 

Amit Majmudar – Constancy
Bracha K. Sharp – After The Questions
Jennifer Abod – At the Indian Ocean
Pauli Dutton – While Teaching Line Dancing at a Senior Center, Someone Accuses Me of Always Being Happy
Donna Spruijt-Metz – Day 0: Shekhinah
Robin Turner – The Unfolding

Track and Field by Amit Majmudar

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Track and Field

I wanted to title this “Ode to my Chicken Legs,”
but what you see up there’s a little kinder
to the last ninth-grader in Ohio
to start shaving,
and not for want of fuzz.
These are runner’s legs, I told the mirror.
Runner’s legs, I told Sarah and Nikki,
who noticed and snickered.
I must have believed it, since I did try out
for Track and Field.
I springboarded off a folded Nike,
that winged Goddess of Victory torchbearing me
through my former births, a whole Panchatantra
of animal forms, Bengal fox, snow leopard
backing through the squall’s white curtain,
last of the grey wolves that showed up
in the fairy tales and then the game bags
of a Europe once forested, once fanged.
At last, my fitful Ovidian flickers
settled on a shape, a caracal
slender and brown and alert like me.
My runner’s legs, my poet’s hands
destined soon to mythmake admissions essays
furred and padded to paws
that turned the track to a field
of clouds like the one I’d seen
out of a Boeing’s oval window on the flight
here from Ahmedabad five years before.
My teen fuzz grew into whiskers, my stride
grew sleeker, noiseless even. I was flying
again, not home, never again
home, but into an unfamiliar
all-American glory, arms
rising in a V as I lunged face
first into the future, shoelace
fluttering its aiglet. One last
metamorphosis for me, spread-eagle: returned
to my body of origin, my domicile: denied entry
on the roster. A running joke forever after.
Sparrow brains huddled in a row and chittered at me
as I limped twenty-six miles to the school nurse
with my palms bleeding human blood,
my cheek and elbows bleeding human blood.
Under me, the only trace of all
my transformations: skinny, scraped-up,
feathered and three-pronged chicken legs.

*

Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. The former first Poet Laureate of Ohio, he is the author of the poetry collections What He Did in Solitary and Dothead as well as two other poetry collections, four internationally acclaimed novels, an anthology of political poetry, and a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. Awarded the Donald Justice Prize and the Pushcart Prize, Majmudar’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best of the Best American Poetry, and the eleventh edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. A memoir, Twin A, is forthcoming in the United States in 2022. Two novels are forthcoming in India in 2022 as well: an historical novel about the 1947 Partition entitled The Map and the Scissors, and a novel for young readers, Heroes the Color of Dust. He is currently co-creating a graphic novel/web comic, The Kali Yuga Chronicles. Visit www.amitmajmudar.com for more details.

Constancy by Amit Majmudar

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Constancy

The best way to be
alone is to have someone

somewhere in the house.
Which means

for your solitude not to feel lonely, you need
someone else

to be alone, too.
By you, my love, I mean

me,

of course. That goes without
saying, which is to say, you and

me

forgetting each other sometimes
proves how completely

the same empty jam jar
holds us, two fireflies

scooped out of the same evening,
meeting at a knife hole in the lid

to lick the same star.

*

Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. The former first Poet Laureate of Ohio, he is the author of the poetry collections What He Did in Solitary and Dothead as well as two other poetry collections, four internationally acclaimed novels, an anthology of political poetry, and a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. Awarded the Donald Justice Prize and the Pushcart Prize, Majmudar’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best of the Best American Poetry, and the eleventh edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. A memoir, Twin A, is forthcoming in the United States in 2022. Two novels are forthcoming in India in 2022 as well: an historical novel about the 1947 Partition entitled The Map and the Scissors, and a novel for young readers, Heroes the Color of Dust. He is currently co-creating a graphic novel/web comic, The Kali Yuga Chronicles. Visit www.amitmajmudar.com for more details.