Poetry: “Another Failed Elegy” by Gauri Awasthi

Another Failed Elegy

The other night, I saw you at the Delancey-Essex subway station crouched, crying, draped in your orange saree with white flowers painted all over it. The ones you picked from the verandah floor, mercy of the neighbor’s Harsingar tree. I still don’t smell flowers I want to worship with, out of habit. You always insisted that what is divine must reach the divine first. Even when I knew your dead body was lying 7508 miles away in our drawing-room, I kept running into you. Even when I couldn’t reach home to cut your fingernails one last time, with the same attention, you braided my locks for school each day. Or embrace you, remembering that I couldn’t find you at the door the last time I flew back because your Alzheimers was getting progressively bad. And maybe why I can’t write a poem about you not being here is because so much of forgetting is remembering through words. And it still feels like you’re here – in the Burman songs, in the melody of the hardwood harmonium, in the sweet smell of all the white flowers of the world I’ve dared not to pray with.

About Gauri Awasthi

Gauri Awasthi, born and raised in Kanpur, India, received her MFA in creative writing from McNeese State University. She has won fellowships from Yaddo, Hambidge Center, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sundress Academy for The Arts, and others. Her writing has been published in Best New Poets 2023, Quarterly West, Notre Dame Review, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and others. She is an Associate Editor at The Offing and teaches Decolonial Poetry Classes with various independent organizations.