Shree Ganeshaya Namah
Vivek Sharma

You came home after a long stay
in a country whose name now melts in my mouth.

Mad with passion, the whiskey in your breath
made an elephant go crazy. I was still a human.

I didn’t answer your several knocks,
and seconds later the door flew,

            your right foot

raised in a ninja kick—
Did she cheat on me, that whore?

The words hung mid air before you raised
your hand that morphed into a trident

knocking my head off, which rolled far
in the corner. It was the year of the Hand of God.

Four years ago mother had taken a bath:
the dirt of her body lay scattered across the Himalayas.

A master of fine arts in sculpting she made
me. From that day I became the gatekeeper

of her antechamber. On the day you arrived
I didn’t recognize your slurred voice as you

kept knocking the front door: wasn’t I
meant to follow my dharma?

In she walked, my mother, shell-shocked. A drunk-
fuck like you couldn’t console the wrung
heart of a mother bent beside her son’s torso.

Out you rushed, grabbed the first thing you saw—
a baby elephant’s dripping head,

              the trunk still swinging in the air.

Whoever gave you the training must have
been a constant Lotus-Eater. You performed

the most ridiculous surgery in the history
of the universe.

                                   ~

I say this, not out of malice or contempt, but
only a passing fondness as I ride my mousey EV

to work, my head bulging with all kinds
of wisdom as I listen to a podcast on stoicism.

My trunk sometimes pushes down large piles
of typewritten words, while sometimes it picks up

false beginnings before I roll them into balls
of questions and throw them towards you, O my father.

Vivek Sharma is a South Asian poet residing in the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan peoples. Their work appears in The Malahat Review, South Dakota Review, and Zaum.