Divya Victor: I am Divya Victor, and this is PoetryNow. I imagine the speaker of this poem as a child reporter. Someone who has access to the use of magical tropes. And this child speaker uses these tropes to report the state of their home to a father who is not there. That very much came from my experience of not knowing as a child where my father was going when he was migrating as a laborer. So, this is very much a father that’s been taken away by labor market forces to work in countries that are far away, unimaginable to a child.

(READS POEM)

BEDS: N 10° 45’ 55” / E 78° 42’ 35”
 
in it we clip it comics
                                   
                                    Appa, our sheets are sails                when those people came
                                    they trapped the wind that leaves your body behind
so we find a piece of it land                         
in it we clip it the postage stamps
                                   
                                    Papa, our letters are shirts              when those people came
                                    they stripped the night that leaves your body behind
so we loosen the it soil
in it we clip it the obituaries
                                   
                                    Bapa, our names are masks             when those people came
                                    they carve out the eyes that leave your body behind
so we dig the it damp
in it we clip it the headlines
                                   
                                    Naana, our rice is sand                     when those people came
                                    they filled the bowls that leave your body behind
so we peel back the it sod
in it we clip it the coupons
                                   
                                    Baba, our blood is water                   when those people came
                                    they drained the well that leaves your body behind
so we fill it with it sky
in it we clip it the tongue
                                   
                                    Abbaa, our cries are coups               when those people come
                                    they will steal the sons who leave your body behind       

* * *

The “it” sound becomes this way of presenting the sound of clipping, the “it it it it.” It’s this sort of truncated, staccato presence. It results in the separation of one thing away from its context. For example, we clip headlines to place them in a scrapbook that helps us make sense of the world we’re in. And this clipping, for me, became eventually connected to how we clip or curb our own bodies in order to fit into new contexts. The clipping of a certain vowel sound to shift our accents, as a way of clipping our tongues.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

in it we clip it the tongue

As the poem evolves, the reports that are coming from that child speaker to this absent father grow increasingly disturbing and explicitly political. In the early parts of the arc of the poem, the child is undertaking perfectly innocent activities, like clipping comics and collecting stamps. And the further one moves down the arc of that poem, the child is starting to do things that don’t seem quite right for that age, like clipping the headlines or clipping obituaries. In this way, the loss of the father, whose body can’t be left behind in the home, is replaced by an archive of clipped documents and the sprouting of a new clipped identity.

Katie Klocksin: That was Divya Victor and her poem “BEDS.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.