For My Niece after the Oak Creek Temple Shooting
“There was a mass murder of people who look like us.
You’ll be upset, let me cook something for you.”
Sounds crazy, no? But what’s an Auntie to do?
Food is the code of love, the more the ghee, the more
the love. “Here, eat one more jellabi, just for me.
It’s not oozing oil, what a thing to say, you’re so thin, simply eat.
“Dhall and roti, and saag or sambar, and rice and pickles, and
my great-auntie’s curry, just for you. It will make you nice and strong.
Bullet-proof, in fact, my child.
“Surrounded on the outside by the prayers of a hundred Aunties,
only good things can come to you now.
Coated so thoroughly on the inside with ghee and sugar
“and food from our hands that you will know
you are loved invincibly, unswervingly, and – let’s be honest –
sometimes even annoyingly. But always loved. Even if,
“God forbid, a madman’s bullet should hit you.
I am coming to the vigil tonight, for the shooting victims.
Are you coming? Can I cook and bring you food?”
….
….
This poem is from the chapbook Carrying the Ocean by Shymala Dason (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/carrying-the-ocean-by-shymala-dason/
Shymala Dason is a first-generation immigrant from Malaysia to the US, and the child of second-generation immigrants from India to Malaysia. Her poetry naturally centers on belonging and unbelonging in family and immigrant life. She has been shortlisted for the Flannery O’Connor short fiction collection award and been published in The Massachusetts Review, The Literary Review, The Margins, the Asian American Writers Workshop war anthology, Voices of the Asian American Experience, and elsewhere. She is a developmental editor for fiction and memoir. Carrying the Ocean is her poetry debut. (She is @ShymalaDason on Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky)
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