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Two People on a Four-Person Table

Poems

Noor Dhingra

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FEELING:

The one where the sunset you’ve been looking at is slowly nothing but a smear of old-lady
lipstick, the kind you’d imagine your grandmother wearing (if she wore lipstick), and all at once,
the sky is dark and the lovely town you once lived in is only visible through the window of a
fast-receding train, and you have slipped like a paring knife between sense and experience,
forgetting to touch it, forgetting to make it real.

The one where you forget every color and name and face and wish to be transported to a small
river at the edge of knowing, only pausing to breathe in-between the soft sounds of otherworldly
happenings, not entirely alone but almost indifferent, and life passes by like a hiccup or a small
floating bubble and you think what’s inside the bubble might be happiness but you never know
because it never bursts.

The one where you walk out with an umbrella and the air briefly fools your body into believing
that it is mild, and the afternoon is drippy; a haze is in the sky and the sky is in the puddles.

Maybe this can be my earliest memory.

The one where I

The one where your arms and legs go completely numb so you try and distract yourself from all
of this simultaneity but the sick vertigo when you try to focus on something mundane  —  a
favorite chair, a song, a street you once drove on  —  plunges you into an ocean, a kind of
kaleidoscope where thoughts repeat themselves infinitely and you try to constantly stay afloat.

The one where you’ve built an idea about the future like an intricate origami creature inside your
chest, and slowly or suddenly the possibilities turn into impossibilities and for hours or days
there’s a rustling in your rib cage as the complex structure destroys itself, unfolding and
flattening, unfolding and flattening pleat by pleat.

— a photograph, a bruised knee, a streak of nightlight —

The one where you meet an old friend, or a new one, and you feel a strong current running inside
your chest that makes it hard to stand straight, and in that moment, every word feels intensely
inadequate but you only chip at the pebbles of the mountains building up inside of you, and it
hurts - like a ripped cable - so painfully, so inefficiently, so harshly.

The one where the air feels like a hot air balloon but you are far below, near the water that crawls
up your skin, water that climbs up your back, asking questions you haven't answered since you
were fourteen, thirteen, twelve — and then something slips and no one bothers to clean it up, and
the air drifts away and leaves you breathless, and no one
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The one where the paring knife doesn’t slip through

The one where it feels like summer — that one summer many years ago when it all overlapped
like concentric circles, like an endless afternoon circling with the ceiling fan, and the feeling
wasn’t unpleasant, but felt like a long swim to the deep end and and you wished so badly that it
was possible to breathe underwater because it felt like you were a nothing but a thin wisp of skin.

The one where your insides turn into a large metal bowl that won’t stop clanging, and the sounds
ring until they become a part of the sounds you’re always used to hearing and you reach for your
phone at sunrise to snooze an alarm that you never set because it felt right to be awake before
your breath finally caught up.

The one where you don’t remember the word for when you don’t speak because you can’t
pronounce the sounds right, when you open your phone to an empty screen and suddenly realize
that you’re the once-in-a-blue-moon-ly — not the daily, not the weekly, and maybe not even the
monthly.

The one where skin doesn't feel like skin when its not theirs or yours, when it doesn't ever feel
right because it had never felt right — when the darkness in the room feels like nothing but
heavy air.

What is darkness if not heavy air?

Being feels like space between your pillowcase and your tired head, like the space, if there is a
space, between the self and the conglomerate, like a daydream —

(It’s impossible to disappear and you always questioned why)

One more day until you forget the feeling of their name on your tongue, of your name on their
tongue, of feelings of names or tongues, and you know that the city doesn’t know your name but
for that minute you wished so badly that it did.

You walk in the snow for what feels like the first time, and you could swear that your footprints
felt much emptier than the others, when a single snowflake balanced at the tip of your fingerprint
and melted slowly, more slowly, until it suddenly was spring in your palm.

I get home and try to draw a self portrait

I remember that a self portrait is defined by all that isn't the self.

It feels like too much like it did before, like the same few sounds repeating themselves, always
almost, always shaking, always slightly shivering, enough to tell you that it is days and years
before it will be time to sleep, and yet, enough to tell you that all of the people who you meet are
breathing and sleeping and going to bed thinking of the same few things.
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I do not remember the feeling of your eyes or the way you sang “Amazing Grace” in falsetto in
the middle of the night. I do not remember any of the ones where I didn't feel a loud nervousness
- when certainty wrapped up in moments of breathlessness that snuck in whenever we paid
attention long enough to notice that the light was real and all of our corners and edges were
resting against the air that had slept in the lungs of all the rest of them

A tune plays at the end of the tunnel —

I’ve heard this song

somewhere

but never in my own tongue and suddenly everything trembles at the sound that makes
everything seem more tangible.

I think of starting sentences with "I remember” and I swallow them up before they are finished

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Teaching My Body Standard American English Grammar

If my language isn't a language, then what is it?

My language isn’t responsible for lost or stolen relatives.
In the event of a loss, my language isn't there for me
Some nights, my language detains me for interrogation because I fit the profile
In the event of a loss, my language stings me in half-hour intervals.

You ask me what it would be like to read from right to left — I cannot tell you because my body
doesn’t remember.

I dream of twisting my limbs into words instead of speaking to myself in front of mirrors I delete
voice notes I record voices
My body understands the soft t’s and doesn't roll its r’s
I am waiting for my teeth to collide against my tongue
My language doesn’t like company
My language is better when it is left alone

You ask me what it would be like to translate — I cannot tell you because my body doesn't
remember.

If my language isn't a language, then what is it?

Every harsh syllable turns my body into an inanimate object
I wonder if it is possible for my language to be intimate.
I realize that there are no words for how close we have been.

It feels like anything can become gospel if it comes from the right mouth.
It feels like anything from the right mouth can become gospel.

You ask me what —

My language doesn’t want to compete

My language is tired
My language is riddled with red wavy underlines and hushed laughs and parodies on late-night
sitcoms

You ask me what it feels like to not have a language at all

I cannot teach my body to answer
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Teaching My Body Standard American English Grammar

Forgetting (or relearning, or learning, or remembering)

is not as easy as I thought it would be:
I pull at my shirt, I hunch my shoulders,
I fit my lungs into a greater body and turn my hands into the baskets of hot air balloons.
This is a beginning. I do not like to speak about it.

My language doesn't let my chest take flight or lead me like a beacon.

I fall over my feet/the sky is rotating/this
feels like dancing/

The body remembers something primal.

The body tries to forget.

Sometimes I tell myself to feel smaller —

To take up less space until the color of these walls match the
stains of breath on my shirt.
I wet these sheets of paper so that the words flow into each other.
I drench myself in water so that I am easier to fold up.

(Everything I write disappears into itself)

How many unuttered words until this lip

turns into another torn border?
How many nervous sighs until this tongue is
a sixth river lost to sea?
Until these teeth are lost to pride, or punch-lines, or breaking news.

The body translates itself into a bruise.

The body cannot be translated.

I have asked myself so often: how can this be said?

These sounds are hollowed/these faces are foreign/
I have lost my rhythm/

My language needs constant reminders that it still exists.

My language is forgetful. 

I tell my language to find another home, a safe refuge, a less-broken place.

My language cannot own things anymore.

My language has run out of empty space.
These words tiptoe through my body like strangers still practicing how to stay.

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Teaching My Body Standard American English Grammar

A language lasts longer if you salt the water you keep it in —

There is always a stem, even if it breaks,
Even if there is no space for it to grow.
A handful of soil that tastes like chalky asphalt,
A road that vanishes into a tree.
A tree.

I practice speaking like running like catching a late train:

A lonely platform, a yellow line,
a sign that tells me to go home.

Before you ask me where I am from I remember to

tell you that I am afraid of heights.
You ask me why and I tell you that being here feels like falling.

There is enough light in my language for half of me.

The other half doesn’t know what it feels like.

I create a verb for every long silence that is only noticed

when something goes wrong.
Each verb sounds like an explosion in reverse.

Perhaps my language is too heavy.

My language carries the distance between pretending to love and
loving someone for the last time.
I don’t know how to love like my language does.

Before you ask me

I tell you that the I cannot speak without unraveling.

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How To Build a Language:

Blood will flow for anything if you sharpen it enough,

even words, even sentences
even a long coast that lashed against me and bore its salt into my brown skin
I grew up on a different ocean.

Words meet other words at sea:

hearts fall into chests into chests
living things grow into each other if you leave them alone long enough
suddenly there were roots/the ground was soaked/
my tongue is woven
into language/

Something keeps me here, and I wonder

whether the horizon really is the end of it and
other days I wish it to be: and I wonder while
walking while noticing that the
sounds of my feet never match the sounds of my head.



(How could they?
Everybody would notice.)

A language doesn't know it is a language until

you slice it in half:
until you allow it to shrivel up and bleed
until the thing inside of it is no longer a flower but an
endlessness waiting to erupt.
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On Mispronouncing Your Own Name or Phases of Erasure

Still, I often think about the way we talk about our


bodies because I often find it to be false, hands that

never touch, faces that are scared of reflections.

I think about how much one hand is like every

other hand and I am filled with something. The

cashier asks if I want my receipt and I forget

everything about myself. Where did I read about how everything that counts happens in that
space between laughing and crying?

And I stop and I try to walk and I 


try so hard to cry that I laugh instead.

I cover my fingers in formaldehyde and forget my name.

I see people living in street after street packed

with poor, thin houses—the merest rain and boiling

flood collapsing them conveniently into coffins, and

I walk slowly so that I disappear.

My steps leave permanent marks on the concrete and everyone notices that I am there.

So I dream of being in a car, the

kinds that sometime have those plastic ovals that hang from the ceiling above the seats, 

filled with

crystals of cheap air freshener meant to evoke

the fragrance of violets. 

Instead, it smells like

old fast-food and the smell of wilted everything.

And I put my credit card back into my back pocket and

I wonder when my legs will feel like fire,

when my shoulders will burn.

I remember my name and mail it to myself so that it reaches me in

5-7 business days.

I open an envelope from the UPS store and fit my

body in and it is like driving on a highway because

even though I am on the other side,

everything looks the same.
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I enter a department store:

maybe I am wandering around Sporting Goods, and I get to a little clearance section, and
amongst the items there’s a single metal detector on sale, or something like that, just some
random object that means little to me but that nevertheless catches my eye. And suddenly I
imagine someone else, another shopper desperately looking for an item like that, someone who
gets excited just thinking about finding that metal detector. And for a second, I feel an odd
dizziness, almost like I’m going to swoon, but I know I’m not, and it’s not a bad feeling. 



maybe I catch a glimpse of myself in a storeroom mirror. I don’t recognize myself, and it is
worse than it feels. I can hear news headlines in the distance. I do not react. I look into my own
eyes and there are words clogged in my throat that do not need to be said yet. My vanishing
language vanishes before I can dream in it.


my body forgets to pass through the metal detector. I am in trouble.


maybe this poem tastes like nervous energy and I don’t know all of the words that want to live in
it, but perhaps you do.

maybe I am wandering around Art Supplies, perhaps by accident. I look at the oil paints and
realize that midnight is many colors — black and blue are just two of them.

maybe I see someone familiar, a memory like a dream or a dream without a face. I look in the
mirror again. I try to I see myself racing along the edge of a lake. A man is running behind me
raises me up and over a thorn-filled bush that blocks my path – I don’t remember arriving.

I sit on a couch. It reminds me of home. A torn comforter; a small Domestic Catastrophe. It is

quiet here, unnerving. I think of the dryer door that won’t close and an interior light that stays on
as if to signal unceasing emergency.

my body passes through a metal detector. There are no sounds this time.

maybe I am on the first floor of Modern Bazaar. It is summer in New Delhi and the air is humid,
like the color blue or the anxiety of language. I hear Christmas music and wonder if this is what
it feels like for places to have memory. I leave my mother and go to the food section — we don’t
end up buying the chocolate even though it was right there.

I am somewhere between a persimmon and a child wearing light-up sneakers, still trying to count
the number of times I have seen my mother skip meals. There are berries here that I don’t know
the names of. I see her look at empty shopping carts and remember da-old food in Tupperware.
In this moment, my body feels numinous like an apple or an overripe metaphor.
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maybe I am at the Farmer’s Market on a Sunday morning. It feels as ripe as a peach before it
falls from the tree — ripeness comes before the fall. Next, the ants or the hand of a small child.
Then the teeth. The end of peachness as I know it. What am I giving up to be here? 


my body is passing through a metal detector. A loud shrill that everyone but me can hear

my shoulders are burning. My shoulders were always burned. I had smeared myself with baby
oil infused with iodine. I am painting my skin a burnt orange deeper than the marigolds planted
in a circle.

when I reach the cashier’s, I forget how to count my coins. I ration out mistakes my mistakes. I
must devour them slowly. I must systematically create confusion or escape entirely.

I remember my mother calling me the apple of her eye. How many apples does it take to make an
eyeful? To keep the doctor away? To make a jug of hard cider? If I say that I taste the summer
that my mother stopped talking to me in my apple then I must be a liar. The only way to eat an
apple is to taste nothing that is real.



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Consider the following sentence from one of Shakespeare´s comedies Pericles, Prince of Tyre :
“What is that?”

The question unravels itself until it swallows up the question mark. What is that. The statement
breaks down and tries to count the number of words it needs to sound stable. What, the illegible
scribble of a three-year old playing hide-and-seek in a room held together by nervous
punctuation. Is, an old pendulum shifting between past and present. The act of referring
backwards or forwards, a wooden swing at the end of a comma. That.

The language points you and you follow, until language is thought and thought is writing. And
writing is thinking or doing words. I am trying to detach the word from the sentence. The shop is
across the street. Where “across the street” is understood to mean “across the street from where I
am right now.”How far is “here”? Can this sentence take you “there”?

A blank page is a blank page with words. A memory remains memorable absent, or dissolves
fully into the realm of constructive imagination. A self-conscious narrator talks to me and forgets
to introduce himself. I link myself to stories with a single “and”— sometimes it is the only clause
that makes sense.

The act of referring forwards or backwards brings me to this room. I look at the curtains and I
remember the children playing hide-and-seek. A plural first-person voice alienates itself from the
sentence, there is only one child left. A blank page is a child playing hide-and-seek. But children
are remarkably bad at hiding — curiously, they often cover only their face or eyes with their
hands, leaving the rest of their bodies visibly exposed.

This blank page covers its face and breathes softly.

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Anything can be a time machine/ 





I’ve lost most names for things from my childhood

can’t name the name of my father or his father or
the plate I ate breakfast in. scrambled eggs with
onion and tomato/ a little house/ two rooms/ a
bathroom/ a cramped kitchen/ a home/

beguilingly credible in its realistic
setting so I cannot determine the number of
characters because it is author who assigns them
names and characteristics, and I have nothing but
names and words to guide me/ I become a
helpless victim/ I scream at
my mother instead of the author because it is easier/
I’ve lost most of the names for things from my
childhood/ there are years that I skim and leave out/
characters like time machines like elms grown crooked
into each other, knobby-rooted & shooting nine-stories
into the sky branching out yet again / a skyscraper/
a penciled-in window/ a chimney/ they all say that they
doesn’t mean to hurt me and I remember the words
as if they were still true or ever true/ & my father asks me
what I mean when I tell him I am busy studying
during dinner every night/ I cannot resist the temptation
to read / I reach for the reader with a capital R but I am
forever lowercase/ the words churn in my stomach
it feels like battery acid and I feel like the feeling of
missing out / I don’t remember the name
of the name of the hunger that felt like S-T-O-P


maybe I’m older now and my skin feels taut/


S-T-O-P on my lips like my parents and on

T.V. but I can’t let myself say it even though I
I can spell it/ I stand on the same balcony and
the sun licks my skin clean/ my skin cannot ever
be clean/ I try S-T-O I can spell it S-T I cannot
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What I Think About When I Think About the Weather

Do you see how the snow is still falling?

An endless sifting of the clouds?
The quiet way the world shreds itself apart?

Each day, the to-do list growing longer. Mix one part water, one part flour.

Use the handmade paste to glue something, anything, together. Let the finger pads stick to each
material object, as if the world wanted to be held.
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What I Think About When I Think About the Weather

You opened my window in the evening—night hours reddened with the smell of dripping iron.
what shade of blood was the last sunset?

What shade of blood are our names, or the skin that chains them?
What shade of blood are our own dark faces?



I see the sun set and look at the stray curls on your forehead. It is late now, so I hold you and
your too-quiet skin. 

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What I Think About When I Think About the Weather

Plant a tree, maybe an apple tree.

Watch the animals come—black bear, deer, the careful raccoon—to eat the windfall turning
sweet in tall grass.

Pippin—the name for an apple that used to mean seed—

is an old word for a new world.

Plant a new word for an old world before most of the orchards are gone.

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What I Think About When I Think About the Weather

The falling of a leaf onto a pond is one movement in a process composed of many movements.
It floats for a while, crisply. Then softens and sinks.
It’s funny what comes to mind.


Soften your eyes and look at a tiny brown dot on the horizon. In a dream, climb a hill on the
other side of town. It is an arduous climb.
At the end, are you afraid of falling?

You were a brown dot on the horizon as small as an ant or a bug, but I knew it was you, and I
woke up smiling.

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What I Think About When I Think About the Weather

This summer was a long funeral. Instead of flowers from a shop everyone brought wild flowers
or herbs, and the coffin was completely green and smelt lovely, with all the lavender and
rosemary and bay. Except I don’t like sage, which is too bitter.



I didn’t really say goodbye to the sun until the funeral, but you told me that it was okay because
it died in its sleep. I wonder if it hurts when you die. I hope it didn’t. I hope it’s like sinking into
a feather pillow and everything getting softer and lighter. I have dreams where I fly above our
house. It’s fun, and I am really light.



Do you think it’ll be warm again?
Do you think I can fly so high that I can meet summer again?

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animal

I am an animal and other animals are animals


I am an animal and other animals are anomalies

I am an anomaly and other anomalies are animals are anteaters are astrologists I am other
animals are anatomies

I am an antibody/ body/ anybody and 


other bodies are 

ontological 

I am an ontology and 

other ontologies are litanies



I am longwinded and thieving

I am thieving and thriving

I am an ameba an anemone an 

enemy anything an analysis

I am and

here we are harmony

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Rare

I walk around uncomfortable in my jeans & wonder if the holes

were something I once made. I think about some things
so I don’t think about other things: pizza, poetry, Neosporin.
I no longer mean it when I say please. Sometimes words belong
between certain people and neither one is me.
The walk home from school is lonely & I tug at my
sleeves so that no one can see. We fight about the t.v. remote
control until I apologize. There is a billboard outside the
store I cannot look at anymore. The commercials tell me
this is rare & I breathe slowly until I no longer breathe.
I can’t scream and don't scream
so I repeat it but this time
with invisible ellipsis, and I repeat it
until it is an armada between my teeth:
rarerarerare
& my tongue begins to feel like rope fastening around everything
and too soon and too tightly.
I don’t watch t.v. that night/
I’m afraid of commercials/
I don’t have a favorite movie/
They do not give me keys when I ask if I can leave so
I swallow the door. It tastes like leaving but I still stay.
If doors tether us to life then I float above the pavement,
tied together by the fraying threads of my nightshirt, biting
the ends of the knots between a conversation 

& an exit.
My mouth is wet and I choke on cotton until I leave my body
whole in mid-air illuminated by oncoming headlights,
a tiny song, a pixel in the pixelated mouth of hope,
or whatever it is that propels thoughts & aeroplanes &
sixth-grade grammar tests with red ink and bad grades.
& I hear the red wire blue wire optimism of my mother’s voice
fading into a prism behind an empty house, lights flickering like
the word fragility & I dream & dream until I am tall with
laughter & I dream until there are two cabs idling in the driveway.
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hairline light

On the side of the road: luggage,


an open suitcase spilling out music CDs &

no person. I say my name & I repeat my name

until I swallow it and store it in my chest.

it does not make me whole but it is a name for

grief to grow into, into the hairline light between

ocean & ocean & ocean.

There were small blue flowers

breaking through the cracks when the weather warmed, 

huge dusty traffic cones I had to swerve to avoid,

the occasional passerby, too far for conversation,

but close enough to study the new styles

of hat and jacket, each one’s way of walking,

a shuffling gait, a jaunty step. And then

then it all felt like memory—blue skies like rocks

hitting my body & my body is a small world,

a paragraph lifted from an old story. I hold

a rock in my hand, its slopes worn smooth

as powdered skin,

its touch glimmering as if it

remembered these many years that were

dimly remembered, like morning rain

finds sparking grains that embedded themselves

in tiny dimples. A face filled with water

frothing at the edges, overflowing,

ocean & ocean & ocean. 

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a shadow of a found thing

once we were birds carrying the sky to night &


day & night, gulping down hollow stars as if they were

medicine — & they were medicine.

lulls are false senses of security. maybe we enter a garden:

The boulders are not bullets.

The wildflowers are not people, splashes of clover, dollops of poppy, ribbons of milkweed,
blooming, bursting from swaths of rye, alive.

red as an alarm but never an emergency exit, because

what is an exit if not an emergency?

we write forgiveness letters and thank-you letters to

open fires. how much grief is a life?

I don’t want to write about sadness

or try to fit the word “synchronicity”

into a poem. & when I look back,

everything I write is concrete and the concrete has a

large gaping hole in the middle. 

this is half a life: the other

half is always forgotten, a shadow of a

found thing, a sun beating like a heart or a

heart beating like a bird carrying the sky to heart to

the day to the night.