Poetry by Rumit Pancholi

Awake under Anesthesia

She cringes when she feels him
cut through her cheeks
in swift strokes with his scalpel.

He rearranges her face
until he makes her the woman
she wants to be,

but as the blood warms her cheeks
and dribbles from her eyes
to her chin,

she can only think
of words to distract her—
relief—leave—veil—

until her wedding dress
covers her body. At the funeral,
the priest had whispered

that in extreme pain,
it helps to picture someone else
feeling it.

How can I, she wonders,
when these hospital rooms
have mirrors on their ceilings?

Anatomy of a Ghost

You have no bones
to pick up now, no grinding
of footsteps in this old
filthy sandbox
behind our porch swing
caked in rust beside
father’s shed,
your tiny jasmine buds
disappearing into
puddles you stop caring
to fill up, his unfinished fence
never picked up.
Now home, two nerves
calm inside when I tell you
the artist in me
is painting Andrew and I,
the susurrus of our voices
an impossible idea in
your mind: first wean away,
the pulling apart
of your umbilical cord
the snap of it hitting back
like a flimsy tree pressed against
the ground then letting free
a ghost inside.

After David

My father, a religious man, dreads another David
in me when he sees me, a ten-year-old
in the kitchen. In my mother’s apron,
I reach up to the stove, a saucepan warming.
He passes by, looking away.

I grip a wooden spoon with both hands,
mixing cubes of chicken and potatoes
into the green peppercorn sauce
in such perfect circles
that my mother stops me and asks:

What is imperfection to you?

I stare back blankly, lifting the spoon,
and with Davey’s breath still rising in my spine,
lower it. Somehow he tells me
that our mother will not mind me
following his lead.

Rumit Pancholi is a first year MFA student in poetry at the University of Notre Dame. He has published work in Banyan Review, Double Dare Press, Foliate Oak, and The Clemson Poetry Review, and has work forthcoming in Gertrude and Blue Earth Review. Recently, he was nominated by the Notre Dame Creative Writing Department for the 2006-2007 AWP Intro Journals Contest and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He is currently working on a collection of poetry that explores and narrows the space between familial relationships and sexuality.

Copyright 2007, Rumit Pancholi ©. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.