“Ode to Watching My Sister Eat Lychees” and Other Poems

By Kunjana Parashar

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Jeanne F. Jalandoni - Mango Harvester (2020), Oil on canvas, weaved satin, suede, velvet.
Image description: The painting features a girl wearing a purple dress, carrying a basket of bright-yellow mangoes. The girl’s black hair is tied up. She faces towards the right and has a firm countenance. The background of the painting features dark-blue and white floral patterns. Rendered mostly on canvas, the painting’s lower background is textured by green textiles woven into the canvas, painted red. The painting is unframed and placed against a white background. 

Green Bottle Flies

 

When the pigeon died

and rotted close to an old rubber tyre,

the green bottle flies came.

Battling the tongues of frogs,

battling the webs of hidden spiders,

they came, the bottle flies,

green metal shine on their backs.

I’d only ever seen them

in sweetmeat shops, hovering

then squatting over the netted lids

covering dhoklas or samosas,

green bottle flies begging,

Let me in, just once.

I’m not sure why I like them better

than regular flies,

who are just as capable of spreading disease

and feasting on a bird carcass –

perhaps it’s the bottle in the name,

a green bottle, a small vessel of wind and rain

packed on the back of a fly, or is it

a bottle in the throat, glistening

like a metal sheened nail polish

or old and faint

as verdigris on a brass candelabrum. 

They come, either way,

battling the hunger of lizards, dodging

the slow blades of fans with bad capacitors,

the green bottle flies, they arrive

faithful as light

caught in a cat’s emerald eye.

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Jeanne F. Jalandoni - Birthday Girl (2024), Machine-knit cotton, acrylic yarn, oil on canvas, cotton batting, epoxy, fabric dye, charcoal. 
Image description: The textile piece depicts a girl lying next to a large birthday cake, on which are three candles. The girl’s eyes are closed and her upper-body is cushioned by the white background, made of cotton. Behind her are colorful patterns resembling flowers. A variety of fabrics give texture to the work. 

Ode to Watching My Sister Eat Lychees

Every June, my sister buys

a dozen lychees.

Like any raptor with sharp talons,

she twists the fruit from its twig

and claws cleanly through the pocked, red skin

to get straight to the good part,

like guzzling the heart of all lychees ever grown,

their luscious and lucent bodies

glistening like a watered moon.

I watch how her impatient hands

hold the sappy fruit,

how she takes in its faint wooden scent

like a god pleased with good incense.

I watch how she brings it to her mouth,

gobbles it whole, greedily and fast,

stopping only to spit out the brown seed,

Hanuman's cousin – she swallows

the soft pellet of moon.

I watch how not even a tiny bit of flesh

falls from the fruit, spared

out of mercy for an ant or a green bottle fly,

no, no,

she pops in one gooey glop of goodness

after another and I don't even love lychees

as much as she does

but I'm left hungry just by this spectacle.

And watching her this way

who can tell that she's been to the doctor today

or how only yesterday

she was crying over the man

she's been crying over since a year –

                               my sister,

for ten glorious minutes, is returned to me

as the girl with an appetite,

as the girl whose hunger

has not been womaned into shame,

for ten minutes

my sister with lychees in her hands

knows nothing

except

how to gollop

exceedingly well

the simple joy of a seasonal fruit.

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Jeanne F. Jalandoni - The Giving Tree (2024), Oil on canvas, cotton, charcoal, epoxy, plastic vinyl, screenprinted tulle.
Image description: The painting features a half-carabao, half-woman figure. Sitting on the yellow, patterned ground in between two small trees, she holds out her hand towards an orange-colored, oval-shaped fruit hanging from the branch of a tree. She wears a sheer dress made of fabric attached to the canvas. The background is dark-blue and orange. 

Bear

“It is a jungle axiom that one never can say what a bear will do” - Dunbar Brander

So shall it be. I hang by the trunks of trees. Sloth is my ursine right. A black cloud of hide, my cover. My jaw’s full of honey. I crack the earth’s violent dust, its concrete. I hunt for termites. Suck in the dance of ants through the gap in my front teeth. The books all talk of mahua. Oh, do not talk to me about mahua. I eat it like a wildfruit, like a madwoman. I kill men for it, I kill women. Then, I slobber and sleep. Constellate the night in my dreams. When I wake, my snout looks for nuts, roots, and berries. If you come close, I could claw you open like a star’s belly on a dark, dark day emitting light. Or I could send you scurrying for shade, clutching whatever piece of bark you can tear. Or I could shamble down the dell and guzzle the breeze. Who can tell? A bear will do as a bear shall please. 

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Kunjana Parashar is a poet from Mumbai. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Hog River Press, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Prose Poem, ASAP|art, SWWIM Every Day, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2021 Toto Funds the Arts award for poetry and the 2021 Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize.

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Jeanne F. Jalandoni is a New York City-based painter and textile artist whose work explores Filipino American identity through the lens of her experiences as a second-generation immigrant. She earned her BFA in Studio Art from New York University in 2015. Her multidisciplinary practice combines oil painting, textile, and machine-knitting to reimagine ancestral narratives and integrate overlooked aspects of Philippine history. Jalandoni has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in London, Hong Kong, Zagreb, Moscow, and Berlin. Notable residencies include the Textile Arts Center (Brooklyn, NY), and the Same & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts (New Berlin, NY). 

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