Arvinder Kaur Johri

Bowl of Fruits

Mother, I always wanted to be a nun
patched to a cross with my white veil hanging
with an upright spine like the intertwined
cables you knitted on my baby’s sweater.

The spaces between the legs on the cross
moved like threads pulled from my maxi.

What I wanted most was this sweetness of
penance to last. Mother, will I stay pure?

I scrub the floors. The bowl of fruits
is offered to me. Remember, you worked
at a hotel. The rooms were hot and damp.
The fans with their jarring green panes
calling you out for leaving the lamp shade
undusted.

I read one day that it is possible to forget
when mothers and daughters cross-stitch
their prayers on tablemats.

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Arvinder Kaur Johri is an Indian American educator and poet. Her early poems were featured in Sahitya Academi’s Indian Literature when she was 23, and she is again ready to send her poems out into the world. Johri’s poems explore memory, death, love and displacement. Her academic interests include inequities in education, intersectionality and writing identities. You can catch her gardening, reading poetry and learning kathak, a classical Indian dance, on weekends.