If I choose to be reborn, god build this world for me:
Black and brown bodies cascading across the globe
with black tresses and wild eyes. A riot of power
that breaks white into red and red into deep red.
Trees that shed leaves on our naked bodies and sun
that folds into the hollows of dark palms. Breasts that rise
and sag on a willow’s call. Hips that sing to songs
of birthing daughters and sons with winged arms. Children
who churn grief into salt and tweet about games, sibling
fights, their mothers who dance and grandmothers who pray
to a god glowing in their blackest tar flesh.
Arvinder Kaur Johri is an Indian American educator and poet. Her early poems were featured in Sahitya Academi’s Indian Literature when she was 23, and she is again ready to send her poems out into the world. Johri’s poems explore memory, death, love, and displacement. Her academic interests include inequities in education, intersectionality, and writing identities. You can catch her gardening, reading poetry, and learning kathak, a classical Indian dance, on weekends.
