Four of my poems, “Union Maids,” “To Target,” “#Garment Workers, Too,” and “Craft Project,” appear in The Bangalore Review.
Poems
Two Poems in Social Fabric
Two of my poems, “Conundrum Dream Dialogue” and “Delicate Cycles,” appear in Social Fabric, an anthology of visual art and personal writing about textiles and apparel.
Two Poems in Portland Review
Two poems, “Interview with Aduri and Translator, Shubomoy Haque, in Savar, Bangladesh,” and “Sisters,” were published by Portland Review for their Labor Issue.
Two Poems in Puerto del Sol
Two poems from my ms-in-progress, “Kafan” and “First Interview”, were accepted by the journal Puerto del Sol for publication in 2019.
On the Last Night in Dhaka
published in Jaggery
part of The Price of Our Clothes
After a morning highway ride
to Savar, passing roadside piles
of white bags stuffed
with broadcloth pockets,
gingham shirt fronts,
denim lapels—tons
of cotton remains
from factories—
after riding past smokestacks
rising through dirt,
spewing soot
from buried kilns
baking handmade bricks,
after watching, in Savar,
Rana Plaza survivors
push pant legs through
sewing machines
loud as machine guns,
after reaching, by afternoon,
Dhaka’s public cemetery,
to see how microbes
have decomposed
the unidentified
Rana Plaza dead,
after sunset dims my view
of Dhaka’s women garment workers
to silhouettes climbing
on fire escapes, like worker ants,
from one factory floor
to another,
after sitting in starless night
on a mattress in a muddy yard
opposite Pamina, who says:
I have no way out
of the garment industry,
I am confined
with the betterment of my children,
I lie in my hotel bed,
awake to American techno-pop,
jack-hammered from
a nearby disco.
Red, white, blue, flash
into the night with every beat.
Soldiers at the hotel entrance
guard guests—potential targets
for handmade bombs.
After two weeks in Bangladesh,
I long for this country’s
five a.m. call to prayer,
my own country’s music
to stop.
The Light Under, A Conversation with “Dibaxu (Under)” by Juan Gelman
first published in Poetry City, U.S.A.
reprinted in The News, Mexico
Under the metal wing
of another plane leaving home
a field of clouds, moisture
no one can hold
under the clouds
a white page of snow
under the snow
roofs like book covers
splayed open
under the roofs
our cranial bones
under bone
our songs remembering
life after leaving:
in the city
we walked in rags
wrapped around our feet
hunger held us;
we did well
if we had potatoes
new laws took
our fathers’ work
then took our fathers
they aimed at our elders’ hearts
for “friendship
with God’s enemies”
led us to clothed bones
in barrels; yes, we said
these are our sons, disappeared.
Certain of always losing
we stand on the Strong Cliff
ready to strike.
Our tongues tremble
with this exile.
Yet, under our songs of the separated
our roots sing through soil
to other root clusters
feeding trunks, branches
multi-mouthed, green-voiced
leaves of every shape and language
under the leaves, the word
light/
luz/
luce/
lumière/
licht/
свет/
نور/
אור
under the word
The Great Lakes
published in Poetry City, U.S.A.
made into a song by composer Sarah Miller
On the scan of her after-stroke brain, we see her alien graymatterscape
darkened by pools of dead neurons we dub The Great Lakes of Dementia:
Lake Nonsense, Lake Lost Way, Lake Can’t Be Left Alone,
Lake Scrambled Space and Time, Lake Black Hole.
She greets the plumber, sock on one hand, pants at her ankles, oh, the turmoil
in Ukraine. From her chair into walls she can’t see, she bolts,
rebounds, shuffles over her big toes on the way to her piano.
The Chopin etude she first learned more than sixty years ago
clangs atonal until one arpeggio, two, three, harmonize past her plaques and tangles,
hammer a chain of heat through the piano’s lacquered burls, wires, ivory keys,
the yolk-yellow finches perched like grace notes on the feeder,
our helpless hands in our laps as we listen, submerged with her
in Lake Pleaseanneal, Lake Inexpress, Lake Sing Hilarity, Lake Nothing, Lake Boundless.
Dream Rematerialized in Bangladesh
published in Water~Stone Review
part of The Price of Our Clothes
Red threads protrude
from the tips of my fingers,
weaving loom warp
attached to the clucking tongue
of my mother. She says,
why are you wearing that shmattah?
Her words steer my hands
to the nearest fashion outlet,
rifle through rack after rack
for the cheapest blouses, skirts
and trousers to make me
more slender, more
modern professional, more
American shikse, less
frum, less
poor, potato-y
Jewish immigrant
Grandma.
Invisible weft
weaves over
and under this warp,
threads of the years
my grandma and great aunts
made by hand
in garment factories,
work to trampoline
my mother and me
to more.
Crimson threads
shoot through the skin
of my fingertips, fan out
like scarlet highways
past my American horizon,
touch down in Dhaka
as running stitches
so red, they vibrate
a green kameez,
its label, Made in Bangladesh,
We Care, promises
artisans paid enough.
To meet Khadija, twenty,
factory shirtmaker since fourteen,
I wear my green kameez
embroidered with threads
as red as gashes
marking the palms
of women and men
Khadija knew
at Lifestyle, a factory
contracting knifers to cut
deep through the hands
of workers who, together,
marched Dhaka streets
roaring for human workday
goals and wages. Change.
Khadija tells the translator
to ask me: why are you here?
I say: I come from a family
of garment workers.
A century ago, the same
things happened in my country.
Kadija says: Bandhu, Friend.
Bangla and English
hum through the fabric
under my skin.
Activist Means
published in Fashion Revolution Fanzine #001: Money, Fashion, Power
part of The Price of Our Clothes
1.
In this poem, ACTIVIST means Kalpona Akter, not
militant, tree hugger, synonyms on Thesaurus.com.
2.
ACTIVIST means Kalpona, Bangladesh schoolgirl,
family breadwinner, age twelve.
3.
ACTIVIST means Kalpona, GARMENT WORKER,
awake, on her feet in a tiny, narrow clothing factory
twenty-three days straight, cutting cloth
into trouser belt loops, showering in the shared bathroom,
drinking tap water laced with toxins, tamarind cheeks burning
from supervisors’ slaps. Kalpona, afraid to say: No.
No to six dollars a month, four hundred fifty hours of work.
No to the one building exit barred by stacks of pants—
locked. No to colleagues kicked, necks pressed hard
by supervisors. No to private overtime shifts under managers
thrusting like needles into female employees’ fabric. No voice
until “strike” from the mouths of her co-workers pushed
Kalpona to the front line, to defeat’s shadow, to the flint
of a union class, spark for her first luminous NO
and YES to talk between supervisors and colleagues.
Her voice so bright she was fired and blacklisted from the industry.
4.
ACTIVIST means Kalpona, VOICE, who flies from Bangladesh
to the New Jersey office tower of Children’s Place—
international retail brand of onesies, kids’ jeans,
boys’ shirts—to bring the C.E.O a message:
please give more than one hundred forty dollars
to families of garment workers, who, while sewing
Children’s Place clothing in Bangladesh’s
Rana Plaza office tower, were maimed or killed
when the building collapsed. Know
that Children’s Place’s demand for the cheapest
clothes on the quickest deadlines
created Rana Plaza.
5.
ACTIVIST does not mean Garment Industry Destroyer,
name given Kalpona by Bangladesh garment factory owners—
many of whom sit in Bangladesh’s Parliament.
The Ministry of Commerce tells the New York Times
the garment industry fixed itself after Rana Plaza.
Kalpona says: WE STILL LAG BEHIND,
points to unions controlled by factory owners,
worker’s unions forbidden to speak to workers.
6.
In this poem, ACTIVIST means Kalpona Akter, but
I AM A WOMAN, HUMAN, is what Kalpona says.
Her bicycle leans against the wall
by her office desk. Her wide smile embraces me.
Easy For Me
published in Fashion Revolution Fanzine #001: Money, Fashion, Power
part of The Price of Our Clothes
To take
my brown Gap
corduroys, cheap,
made in Bangladesh,
knees faded,
to Goodwill where
someone will throw
them into a bin
to sell to a textile
recycling center
where, deemed
better than a rag
or landfill garbage,
my corduroys
will top off a ton
of Ralph Lauren,
Old Navy,
countless other
American brand
frayed shirts,
overstretched
pullovers, worn-
thin dresses,
will sail to Cameroon
to become part
of a one hundred pound
bale worth
a month of meals
for five in Cameroon.
My corduroys will be resold
to a customer in the capital
for much less
than a hand-batiked
cotton Kabba,
or any other apparel
made by a Cameroonian,
will keep this African
country’s own
garment makers
unemployed.
Easy.