Fragments on Naturalization

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My father’s name, my mother’s name
I dream the line of letters

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I came not before an apple tree
Malus Sieversii, seeing the faces of silk

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The road before this of blood
The apples tumid with grief

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Ad domestica
A veil of home; a state

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A whole life of waiting
& before that:

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“This poem, at its core, is a poem of refusal. I think often of migration and domestication—of people, of plants, how the history of the two intertwine so deeply—and the things that get lost through these processes. I wanted to map this out with a kind of withholding. I wanted to mark silence and refuse catharsis. So much of what we need to say we can only say by bending language.”
—Snigdha Koirala