Partition Homes

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“Partition Homes” by Sneha Subramanian Kanta received third place in the 2022 Previously Published Poem Prize, selected by Palette editors. We’re honored to share this moving poem.

“Partition Homes” was first published in The West Review.

Partition Homes

                                                             (i)

Exile begins in the throat.
A lost body.

                   A forgotten horizon
                   or the shield of stars.

Ventricular. A harpsichord
with ocean, sand, and salt.

                   The checkpoint of fog—
                   mossgreen scapula.

A winter of absence
trucks lined in Rawalpindi

                   boats set off the shore
                   beside a dawning Jhelum. 

                                                             (ii)                       

Exile begins in the throat.
An arrival.

                   How many words do I
                   know for hunger?

What is the nestling space
between two countries

                   of conflict called?
                   What is the name for basil

or the hinterland hills
or the city where my

                   grandmother first embraced
                   tenderness without speaking

of it? Again the roaring
winds across a tarpaulin.

                   Again another river
                   charcoaling at night.

You dream in three languages,
at least one of them despair.

                                                             (iii)

                   Exile begins in the throat.
                   A departure.

The call of a cliff
or a gutter-stream.

                   Filament flourish, a violet
                   pattern synecdoche.

My grandmother left
a home

                   sailing across two countries.
                   A silent floating accompanies

the whirr of a ship. These
may be fangs, or a dagger.

                   Hinge. The soft gauze.
                   A day of massacre.

                                                             (iv)

Exile begins in the throat.
A lost body.

                   Famished sky of vapor
                   clouds. An assembly

vortex. The trees fraction
into half. Where will you

                   grow thickness
                   if not into the landscape?

Remember. A family.
One daughter.

                   Two sons. Partition.
                   Welt. Ship. Rising tides.

 

                         —originally published in The West Review

 

Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Sneha Subramanian is a recipient of The 2022 Digital Residency from The Seventh Wave, the 2021 Robert Hayden Scholarship at Stockton University, and the inaugural Vijay Nambisan Fellowship 2019. She was the Charles Wallace Fellow writer-in-residence (2019-20) at The University of Stirling. An awardee of the GREAT scholarship, she has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from The University of Plymouth (2017). Her dissertation concentrated on a comparative literature study exploring postcolonial ecocriticism in the fiction and non-fiction of Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh. She is the author of the chapbook Ghost Tracks (Louisiana Literature Press, 2020). Her poems are forthcoming in UBC's PRISM International, Room Magazine, Pleaides, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Most recently, her poem "Witness" is an honorable mention in The 2022 Foster Poetry Prize at Contemporary Verse 2. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal. Website: www.snehasubramaniankanta.com.

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