Tag: Tara Menon

Vigilance by Tara Menon

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Vigilance

A bolide three-foot meteor
crashes into Earth’s atmosphere,
boom, and I think my nonagenarian mother has fallen.
I thud down the stairs.

On another occasion,
instinct propels me to check on my mother.
She falls backward in my room.
With fortuitous timing, I catch her in my arms.

The fire alarm shrieks in the middle of the night.
In a flash, I pound on my mother’s door,
waiting for her to unlock it,
only to be told by the figure
who shadowed me down the flight of stairs
that she’s in India,
a whole other continent away.

It’s hard to imagine a world
without our mothers, my cousin says
on our way to the mall.

We’re always imagining what they’re up to,
even when the seas are between us.

*

Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a two-time finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in “AMPLIFY” (Sheila-Na-Gig), “The Sucharnochee Review,” “Tipton Poetry Journal,” “ONE ART: a journal of poetry,” “Blue Heron Review,” and “Grey Sparrow Journal.”

Masked by Tara Menon

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Masked

Going outdoors for the first time after surgery,
I don’t marvel at the pretty neighborhood
nor the flanking snow nor nature at her starkest,
but at the restorative power of fresh air
combined with walking.

No one sees a woman recovering from surgery,
only a walker ambling with her husband by her side
to catch her if she falls.
He has been gallantly saving her
from her mistakes ever since they married.

No one reads her thoughts
that the birthday she reached
could have been her last or penultimate one.
A surrealistic feeling,
though she intuited she’d be diagnosed
with breast cancer one day,
especially in the terrain of her sixties.
The snowscape feels unreal like it does
when it blankets the area every year.

We walk without masks, our faces masks.
No one knows the worries others carry,
but everyone loves to say, Hi, how are you?
A kindness passed from stranger to stranger.

*

Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a two-time finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in ““Blue Heron Review,” “Grey Sparrow Journal,” “AMPLIFY” (anthology published by Sheila-Na-Gig), “ArLiJo,” and “The Queens Review.”