KUHU JOSHI

Nat Geo says migration is a natural phenomenon, fascinating humans for centuries, and important to ecosystem health

Because in the garden I don’t know the names
of half the trees, I take photos on my iPhone.
Interrupt my mindful walk, but I hope

to return to these pieces of American
geography as soon as I get home. I never do
look them up, nor their leaf-shapes, nor the colours

of their foliage, and what it all means,
being here in America,
among foreign but beautiful trees.
They give me life – especially when I am parched

in the city, packed into neat grids on the subway –
thankyou sir, thankyou maam, scuse me, sorry,
frictioning against people.
It took me twenty-seven years

to learn the names of trees I grew up with in Delhi.
Neem was bitter, and for a while
I had to bite the leaf to tell.
The whole world could be a metaphor if you let it.

I will not let it. I have no patience for metaphors.
Say here. Say me. Insist on my life.
Create my own saplings.
Grow roots. I can name the Pahadi weeds my Dadi

plucked for me with her hands.
Bicchu, especially. That biting nettle
on the hedges of staircases steep in our cousins’
mountain homes in Nainital. You couldn’t touch it

without getting stung. Wild, uncontrollable
weed. My Dadi cooked it. And because she said green
will make your eyes stronger, I look for its many shades

everywhere I go. Out the subway hole in the ground
by City Hall, I name — sycamore, birch, flowering-tree
whose ancestry I am yet to learn.
And yesterday, crunching dry leaves by the river

in Astoria Park with my bare feet, I said, maple,
maple! Until a man panting on his daily run, stopped
to consider me with a side-eye, a short disapproving

tilt of his head, brisk huffy breaths.
When I was an international student,
housed in a room with many windows, living briefly
like a moth in the rich neighborhood of Bronxville,

an elderly man dug his pitchfork
into the ground of his yard,
his fence, thumped his arms,
and stared at my body
as I took my morning walk
among the new suburban bushes,

alien in his neighborhood. And yesterday,
among the dark red of fallen maple leaves,
when another stranger turned for a second-peek,
his eye glinting like a knife

against the ebb of the East river, I grinned at him.
And you know what? For the first time in my American
life, I did not give a shit. I enjoyed it.

Kuhu Joshi is an Indian poet and the author of My Body Didn’t Come Before Me (Speaking Tiger, 2023). Her work has been published in Poetry, Best New Poets, Black Fork Review, Rattle, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, and other publications. She earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she was a Jane Cooper Poetry Fellow and studied under the mentorship of Marie Howe. She has received support and grants from the Academy of American Poets, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Tin House, the Teaching Artist Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Joshi teaches creative writing and composition at Pace University and City University of New York.