Lopamudra Basu (Diaspora Dual Identities)

Lopamudra Basu

 Black Floor Lamp

 

Picked up from the pavement in Pelham Parkway

during our early scavenging days in the Bronx

 

brought to life from the garbage heap,

the black floor lamp lit our first bare studio.

 

It watched over the four large suitcases packed

with care by mothers in another country

 

the hard tops vandalized soon after arrival but

still carrying saris and shawls: treasures soon useless.

 

The new mattress, shiny, barely out of plastic wrapper

without a headboard, covered by a flowery comforter.

 

Sounds of ambulance wails on the way to the City Hospital

alley way words in English, Spanish, and Italian

 

And the loud screams of the ninety -year old lady downstairs

complaining of our heavy feet dancing on the floor.

 

Smells of roasting meats, melting pizza, take-out Chinese

our own early meals, monotone of cumin, onion and garlic.

 

the little space in the shelf for an incense burner, jasmine

and sandalwood sticks and the old CDs of Tagore songs

that like the blue airmail letters and the Sunday phone calls

for ten minutes made us feel even more alone.

 

Twenty- five years later, the dead black floor lamp sits for Spring pick- up

in front of our house near a wooded creek in western Wisconsin.

 

Lopamudra Basu is Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stout. Her poetry has been published in Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Barstow and Grand, Dhaka Review, Parcham, Prachya Review, Silver Birch Press Blog, Poetry Calendars of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, Postcolonial Text, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians, Best Asian Poetry 2021-2022 and the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022. She is currently co-editing an anthology of South Asian Women’s Poetry of trauma which is forthcoming from Yoda Press in 2025.

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Setu, April 2025