When I Reach for Your Pulse (Stahlecker Selections) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rushi Vyas was born in Toledo, Ohio. He is co-author of the chapbook Between Us, Not Half a Saint (GASHER Press, 2021) with Rajiv Mohabir, and his poem “Morning Chant: Scatter” was republished as a broadside by the Center for Book Arts. He earned his MFA from the University of Colorado-Boulder and his BS from the University of Michigan. His poems have been published in Adroit Journal, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Landfall (NZ), The Offing, The Spinoff (NZ), Tin House, and elsewhere. He has worked as a career counselor, curriculum developer, editor, and facilitator. In 2019, Rushi moved from Brooklyn, New York, to O¯tepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, where he currently lives, writes, and teaches.

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Effigy

I waited all my life for my father
to die and when he finally did I heard
the whip of voices caged within
his skull. In the neighborhood, maple
branches sprawled into each other, each
trunk an asthmatic wheeze summiting
the snake line, each limb heaving
into the next. A pattern ripples through
the absence of whom we scatter. I heard
my own pulse shelled by inheritance, felt
the stubborn flesh of a neck that snapped
its own beat. Outside, when people celebrate
the terrorist’s death in the streets, I do not
leave my house. When my father finally
died, we cut him from the ceiling, fed him
sweets, dipped him in oil, and burned,
like an effigy, the voiceless body