When I Reach for Your Pulse

Rushi Vyas

In this electrifying debut, lyric works to untangle slippery personal and political histories in the wake of a parent’s suicide. “When my father finally / died,” Vyas writes, “we […] burned, / like an effigy, the voiceless body.” Grief returns us to elemental silence, where “the wind is a muted vowel in the brush of pine / branches” across American landscapes. These poems extend formal experimentation, caesurae, and enjambment to reach into the emptiness and fractures that remain. This language listens as much as it sings, asking: can we recover from the muting effects of British colonialism, American imperialism, patriarchy, and caste hierarchies? Which cultural legacies do we release in order to heal? Which do we keep alive, and which keep us alive? A monument to yesterday and a missive to tomorrow, When I Reach for Your Pulse reminds us of both the burden and the promise of inheritance. “[T]he wail outlasts / the dream,” but time falls like water and so “the stream survives its source.”

Effigy

I waited all my life for my father
to die and when he finally did I heard
the whip of voices caged within
his skull. In the neighborhood, maple
branches sprawled into each other, each
trunk an asthmatic wheeze summiting
the snake line, each limb heaving
into the next. A pattern ripples through
the absence of whom we scatter. I heard
my own pulse shelled by inheritance, felt
the stubborn flesh of a neck that snapped
its own beat. Outside, when people celebrate
the terrorist’s death in the streets, I do not
leave my house. When my father finally
died, we cut him from the ceiling, fed him
sweets, dipped him in oil, and burned,
like an effigy, the voiceless body