☀ Today's Poem: "On Form" Mia Ayumi Malhotra

April 9, 2025

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

I became a mother and I began to write like a Japanese woman.

Which is to say: I began to write like myself—from the imaginary whence my
mother's mother and her mother before her came.

Things That Are Distant Though Near: Festivals celebrated near the Palace. The
zigzag path leading up to the temple of Kurama.

When I became a mother, my lines began to grow less regular, less sculpted—
and this itinerant prose did not adhere to shapeliness.

Instead it spilled from birth into death and questions of beauty, arranging
itself as it wished. An artful, yet imperfect text.

And so I began to build strange, unkempt houses for my words to live in.
Interior spaces without doors, only half-imagined windows, which opened to
rooms where a person could wander, lost, for days.

It's no surprise this didn't happen earlier—in school, for instance, when a
professor handed me a book of haiku.

Deeply Irritating Things: A man who discusses all sorts of subjects at random as
though he knew everything.

Tell me about the form mothering takes on the page. Why it accumulates
so—fragments, notes. A slow, painstaking assemblage.

And I found myself heavy with the days.

And my belly bulged with them.

And the days accreted like lines.

Things That Give a Clean Feeling: An earthen cup. A new metal bowl. The play
of the light on water as one pours it into a vessel.

from the book MOTHERSALT / Alice James Books

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

“On Form” is a part of a sequence of poems in "Mothersalt" whose loose interiority, fragmentation, and discursiveness are modeled on the miscellany prose diaries of writers like Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Kenkō. Their writings gave me the permission to experiment with lyric forms that “accreted” like “the days,” much like my experience of pregnancy, mothering, and art-making—along with all the ways these intimate, intertwined forms of creation and care take shape in my life.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra on "On Form"

What Sparks Poetry:
Readers Write Back

"I was moved by Ranjit Hoskote’s English translation of Mir’s Urdu poetry excerpt, 'The Homeland’s an Ocean.' Reading the Urdu alongside the English, the mix of those languages, strikes a chord with me, since I grew up with parents who used to recite Urdu ghazals with their Punjabi friends in LA. Seeing the original and the translation side by side also resonates with how I teach about India as a deeply multilingual society in my anthropology classes at Mason....Mir’s idea that 'the homeland’s an ocean that scatters us in all directions' is wonderfully subversive, getting us to think and feel beyond origins and attachments. It makes me want to migrate into his world."

Rashmi Sadana

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

"Ten Questions for Arthur Sze"

"I wanted to use poetic forms that I had seldom or never used before to help me widen my range. For the first time I wrote two short pantoums; I broke the quatrains into couplets and then I floated a caesura inside each line to create tension and shift the rhythm....I also wrote a zuihitsu in which two people hold one calligraphy brush and create the word 'emptiness' together; but the most important challenge was to try to enact a simplification so that clarity is experienced as a deep mystery."

viaPOETS & WRITERS

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