Yamini Pathak
Yamini Pathak's debut poetry collection Her Mouth A Palace of Lamps (Milk & Cake Press) is forthcoming in October 2025. A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship by the NJ State Council on the Arts, her work has been nominated for Best New Poets.
Searching for Grandfather
Brown book stashed with my father’s boyhood
stamp collection multi-hued serrated
confetti from places faded from our maps –
Rhodesia, Ceylon names that echo like faraway foghorns.
The name on the cover is Pran, meaning
life force but he died young left babies who grew up
believing father means someone departed.
I open the doors to my grandfather’s world
and turn and turn finger
chemistry equations, and calculus notes
blue-black ink, in clean cursive like mine.
Flip! the name of a friend, or acquaintance?
Flip! the snatch of a ghazal snagged
on the hooks of his attention
Where did he hear it? Who did he tell it to?
Flip! A draft of a letter to his college dean, formal
as orchids pressed in a page
a scholarship application to move
out of his uncle’s home his cousin is ill
he pleads, stricken by tuberculosis
unknowing, the seed of death
had rooted itself in him already.
He was a singer my father tells me turns to
a page with music in classical notation
to touch his father’s song.
Mirage
in Hindi, is Mrig Trishna, literally deer thirst
or perhaps thirsty deer? Perhaps an allusion
to the illusion of the hunt. Dear thirst,
if I was a time of day, I would be twilight
imprisoned in glass doors, mixed with shadows
of the pear tree yawning outside.
Surprise capture in this momentary mirror, I am
always more belly and hips
than I expect. If I put my hand through, I’m holding
a fistful of peachlight. When I was little, I feared
I was a trick of other people’s imaginations. Why
has it taken so long to fashion this—
flesh and solid, pulse and gristle?
Joy
Lately I have longed to rise and light a lamp
to something holy in the world, which is to say
something holy inside of me.
Through errant white hair, fingers
sift the salt of my ages.
A mind may flutter and snap:
a white sheet on a clothesline.
When the ghost-fingers of fog lift open—
like a paper boat in rain, I fill and fill