THE FUNERAL
For Pierre Joris
The night fell over the cemetery. The white tree with its mottled roots. And the eyes in the belly of its trunk. Yasmine asks: Shall we walk the Margin Path? And we did, single-file: me behind Yasmine, Sarah behind me, who later tells me she imagined us a line of mothers connected by a nonlinear time. I know Malvika would like to be a mother someday. And Yasmine nods, takes a heavy breath: We buried my father in one of the cemeteries in London, from the 19th century, a beautiful place, a quiet bed by the river and beneath a Sycamore tree—then came the Nigerians. Their colorful graves. In Accra, I walked with Kwame down to Jamestown, in the hollowed cheek of the colonial British Forts, where we passed the fishermen, the market of herbs, the fantasy coffin-makers, their ships for the departed sculpted into fighter jets, American dollar bills, exotic fish, bottles of Pepsi-Cola, until finally we passed a beautiful open-air restaurant, where women reminding us of our mothers danced with each other in radiant white dresses, weaving in between the tables and howling with pleasure, a wedding party. At last we asked to join them. They asked: Who are you? We are Malvika and Kwame. Who do you know here? Only each other. My sister, walking past the Buddhist temple in Chinatown, breathing deeply the incensed city, the smoking sandalwood, the crimson cedar, the open portal: Whatever this is—let’s eat here. Yasmine laughs in the churchyard. A reservation for the next life. In the end we realized the restaurant was not a restaurant but a funeral. But not before dancing between the tables, or finishing our plates of fish stew. Yasmine, getting late to the funeral, steps into the car with the Bosnian cabdriver, who promises to her it is his honor to drive her, an honor to drive a mother, before he pulls over so she can vomit on the dry lands over the curb in Sunset Park. Afterwards, after this day and its narrations are put away, I wonder: How did he know? How could he know before the signs? Nevermind. She is distracting him with the telling of a story—about a saxophonist she once heard play in the approaching cemetery—although, lately, regardless of which way he drives, and who he drives that way—he finds he is always quickly approaching a cemetery—when he asks: Whose funeral is it? A Poet. Who will be attending? Mostly poets. In truth, the poet was not a poet but a translator. He was not from Belgium, as the obituaries would list, but from the Maghreb. And, in truth, his greatest claim on this earth was having been a great lover. Most notoriously, of the artist who became his wife. The artist, not so much an artist as a shaman. A wild woman who could play a ram’s bleached skull like a flute, and often did. The wild woman who, tripping over the sod, nearly falls into the open grave, but leaps up again, and begins to sing. Leave me alone! She shouts into the hollow. Go without me to where you must and I will stay here! In truth, the saxophonist was not a saxophonist but a Buddhist monk, who some years ago discovered a technique for how to live without breathing—a combination of whalesong, calisthenics, and circular respiratory techniques. And even the grand old cemetery, only a technology for palpating the oxygen over the wild-grasses, growing like new hair on the graves, and through the lungs of the city. Sarah climbs over the white roots of the tree, and casts her arms around its chest for an hour, maybe more, tandem listening to the clock in the center of her heart. Yasmine felt a past world kick. Just then the car rounded the corner, colliding into a funeral procession so profuse that the entire day’s traffic suddenly seemed only the fragrant, colorful smoke trailing in the air after its wake—and the Bosnian exclaimed: There! Those are your Poets!
THE NIGHT-JOURNEY
My mother’s dreams are a night-blooming garden.
Her desires populate a world of street carnivals and children’s parades.
Every night a Ram-Leela playing outside her father’s house.
Every day in the garden a game of hide and seek with my sister and me.
She hides behind the rose garden, behind the boundary-wall.
In another, she is strolling the Left Bank in Paris arm-in-arm with Javed Akhtar.
They are walking by the River Seine, she is laughing intently at all his jokes.
I take regular attendance on the visitors to her psyche.
My father figures nowhere in the cosmology of her dreams.
And your traces are cast like bright pollen on the wind across mine.
There is a man in my night class with the name: Desire.
I tell no one and no one notices, for the same reason that I do:
language and its porosity—its thinning veil which, if caught
from certain angles, glows translucent in the copper light.
I wonder if this was the origin of darkroom photography.
Some nights I admit I never learned to read.
I am just squinting at your shadow from inside the dark mouth of a well.
It is a custom in my grandmother’s house to never rouse the dreaming.
To view sleep as a covenant between the spirit
and the body and in the body of the dreamer a vacancy—
an absence or departure beyond our control.
Tonight, in bed, I read about the Greek abaton.
A dormitory for eating wild mushrooms and drinking wine,
a doctrine of dream revelation and drug-induced sleep.
As an experiment, I wash your hair from across the city from my dreams.
I pen a letter that grows and stretches across the river like a silver net.
This was between the solar and lunar eclipse. I thought: Why not? It couldn’t hurt.
These days all my longings are oriented towards one finite horizon.
They are a conference of birds following an ancient chorus
across seven valleys, along the seam of a canyon, and into the dark sea.
And in the nights, though no such land may exist, they try to fly back home.
So lately before bed I put stones in the pocket of my pajamas.
Growing impatient for my company, the night sky lets out a soft sigh.
Tonight, I am remembering the sound of the hot rain through the trees,
from the open stairwell on the evening of the earthquake across the Hindukush.
How I was carried over the sea in my grandmother’s bed as the water rose over the city.
And the boat entered the night as language surrendered to the soul.
How despite the trembling of the water, the trembling of the walls,
the trembling of the birds from the forest and the forest from the birds,
my mother came to rouse my from my travels with the same pleasure
as if waking me to greet the scent of the earth rising to meet the rain,
and from across the valley like a bird her hand landed gently on my thigh.
QAWWALI NIGHT
A scent of blooming rose over the city.
I was thirsty so I began to drink. It was my first
day on earth (so goes the story) and everything
was forgivable. Everything was new again.
Yemeni coffeehouses. Calligraphy. Qawwali night.
Everywhere I turned I met devotional singers,
Sufi musicians. Smoking outside of barbershops.
Waiting on subway platforms and conversing inside bodegas.
The Saami Brothers flew across six continents
in the night, and came to our city to sing
new moon to new moon. I came back to life.
Every night in the city was Qawwali night.
I washed out my heart, and began to dance.
This was the flood long described by mystics,
the flood which begins with a broken heart,
and sings through the veins of the aqueduct,
the flood at last blooming the desert back to life.
Inside the sauna with Meera, two discussed a child
named simply “Disco.” Outside, the military
seized the Southern border. My favorite uncle
called with a proposal involving the twisting
of arms and sleeping in tubs. I began meeting
men in the wild where we were strangers,
where we lived without surnames, and only
the ancient technologies: the telephone
and the voice. In the Moroccan restaurant,
eating the vegetarian mezze, we listened to
their collected messages, forced by constraint
to invent horoscopes and weather predictions,
and ask spiritual questions about the innermost
chambers of the heart. One by one, they invited us
out to Qawwali night at the roller-disco?
Qawwali night at the Palestine solidarity encampments?
Qawwali night at the Currency Exchange?
Qawwali night at the Red Hook historic ferry boat,
with the devil’s wine, the one thousand sleeping cats?
Or to Steinway Street, where it was rumored,
the visiting Qawaals were staying as the guests
of an old Iranian lyricist who arrived long ago
with no name, no papers, no visa. I abandoned
all news except for news of Mira Nair’s son,
running for Mayor and newly engaged… (rats!)
Most nights I spent walking through Ditmas.
With the moon as my witness, I began to let go.
I washed out my heart, and poured out the rest
to water the magnolia tree at the roots.
I slept each evening in my prayer clothes,
and dreamed all night of miraculous journeys.
From my breath, the magnolias began to blush.
I felt young again. I felt myself open… opening…
Everything was forgivable (so goes the story).
Everything was new. Electric samovars.
Pollination. Night-blooming garden. Abundance.
Pleasure of strangers. Trauma therapy. Language.
Perfume in the guise of a glass mandarin. Honey
on the tongue with a complicated taste.
You had become a stranger, and the city loved its strangers
most. It granted them refuge and safe asylum.
So many beloveds had been lost to this city!
During blackouts and power cuts, feverish nights.
A real calamity! If you were to tip it over, ten thousand
unmarked people would fall out from its depths—and blush!
Still I looked for you on the subway, refusing to sit down.
I looked for you between compartments. In spilled rice
and in between playing cards. In my fallen hairs I swept
off the floor, and in between the petals of the cherry trees.
I looked for you in Mira Nair’s son, in dust settling softly,
and in the shadows beneath the fingers of the tabla players.
I too became a stranger, but I retained my original colors.
I stained everything I touched, including those who had once
touched me. Even those who brushed against me, or trembled
near me in the streets. Qawwali night had ended.
My heart changed its beat.
Who were you to me by then?
Thief of my pleasures. Thief of my peace.
I looked for your brightness everywhere,
illuminating the night sky, as they swept
the dancehall clean. I gave up drinking
hoping to find you at the end of every evening
and spill out into our wine glass another dawn
to drink. But the city wanted only the stranger.
The strangers wanted only each other.
Time passed, as it ordinarily does.
The world blossoming only after dusk.
The Saami Brothers came and went.
crossing the ocean miraculously in a single night.
Their hems fluttering like petals,
troubling the tides.
Malvika Jolly is the winner of the 2025 Alice James Award for her debut poetry collection Visiting Hours of the World, forthcoming March 2027 in the United States.
Her poems have been featured in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, Mizna, Poetry Northwest, The Seventh Wave, and elsewhere, and performed on a diverse range of stages including The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Joe’s Pub, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Poetry Society of New York, Queens College, and South Street Seaport Museum.
Malvika is a graduate student at New York University, where she is the web editor of Washington Square Review and teaches in the undergraduate writing program. She runs the poetry reading series, The New Third World.
Previously, she programmed and produced events for the Brooklyn Rail, copyedited and fact-checked for Chicago magazine, and reported arts and culture for the South Side Weekly.