The Book
Excerpt from Karma
Dear Diary
This remains the simple choice.
The anonymous confidante.
Clear and to the point.
But then what’s the point of private words
lingering on the page, undirected? There must be
a listener. The truest friend, Anne had insisted.
Yes. A friend. And now I know.
I write the letter M.
Four strokes with the pen,
two peaks, a mountain of a letter.
The letter a follows—lowercase,
the necessary vowel.
And then I mean to write a t
and then a second a—
a perfectly balanced word for my longing:
Mata
The name I call my mother.
But my hand slips or is it my mind? The pen dips
on the page, ink fading with the sudden upturned
sweep of a y. A second a appears:
Maya
The name that only my mother calls me.
The pen continues to move across the empty page.
Remember.
Remember that I love you.
Ghost
Can the dead really speak?
Through the hand and pen of the living?
A mother’s voice floats in from the edge of the
world. A daughter hears the whispers.
Or is it loneliness that conjures
the loved one from the ash?
No one wants to be forgotten.
Not the dead or the living.
I loved you too, Mata. But why did you do what you did?
