Malhar Raga
You fill a copper urn with kush grass, the pile of rice, and garlands of marigolds.
In all four directions, ghosts with quicksilver bellies crowd the sky.
Mercurial, you salaam me, sickle in hand to slit my strings at the bridge.
I slip into dream through the cotton shroud — redline into the underworld at 103rd and
Broadway.
I dip a flower in the Vaitarna River and touch it to my two eyes. It turns into thunder.
The rains begin.
I dip a leaf into the river and it scales into a koyal’s black plume.
Silver glints in a flurry of moons, the rains begin.
The bird in monsoon pinions warbles my name with your larynx and the rains begin.
I open my throat and swallow billows of cloud.
With a stick I write in the sand, My Chandal love with the hole in your throat, it’s hard
not to lick your sores.
In all four directions, ghosts with quicksilver bellies crowd the sky.
Mercurial, you salaam me, sickle in hand to slit my strings at the bridge.
I slip into dream through the cotton shroud — redline into the underworld at 103rd and
Broadway.
I dip a flower in the Vaitarna River and touch it to my two eyes. It turns into thunder.
The rains begin.
I dip a leaf into the river and it scales into a koyal’s black plume.
Silver glints in a flurry of moons, the rains begin.
The bird in monsoon pinions warbles my name with your larynx and the rains begin.
I open my throat and swallow billows of cloud.
With a stick I write in the sand, My Chandal love with the hole in your throat, it’s hard
not to lick your sores.
Esteban Pastorino Diaz, Represa #28 from Aerial, 2005-2010. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
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Rajiv Mohabir is the winner of the 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award and the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016). He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and has received fellowships from The Home School, Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His second volume of poetry, The Cowherd’s Son, won the 2015 Kundiman Prize and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. His poetry and translations are internationally published can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, Quarterly West, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Anti-, Great River Review, PANK, and Aufgabe. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Ozone Park Literary Journal. Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in English from the University of Hawai`i, where he teaches poetry and composition.
Esteban Pastorino Diaz was born in Buenos Aires in 1972. He is a mechanical engineer and photographer. He studied advertising photography at the Academy Fotodesign (Buenos Aires). He was later selected as the artist-in-residence for the Photographic Center of Skopelos (Greece), the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten (Netherlands), the Casa de Velazquez (Spain), and the Fiskars Artists Residency (Finland). Over the course of his career, he has received numerous distinctions, including the Leonardo Award for Photograph (National Museum of Fine Arts) and the Abraham Haber Award for Photographer of the Year (Argentina Association of Art Critics). His works are exhibited widely and included in various international collections.