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Spring Cleaning
Spring cleaning,
Mom says to clear away things that we don’t need.
The clay elephant statue you molded me from your garden’s soil is tucked away into a drawer
She says I’m a Xerox copy of you– no one really knows what Xerox is anymore--
it’s a copier, a little machine that scans an image and spits it out again, but this time a little faded in the corners.
I guess I’m the image of you, a little faded in the corners because America makes her children soft.
You used to tell me that one day, upon leaving this world, you and me and everyone that we came from would reunite in the skies together.
In the star-flecked cosmos of our ancestors, would you recognize me?
Spring cleaning,
Fresh starts.
Our house here is bone-clean, aching to be touched by love, the feeling after scrubbing numb hands in cold water– a desperate longing to feel warmth.
If you were here, I think it’d be a little less pristine,
maybe the beaded pillows would be askew because you’d nap on the couch taking in the Arkansas sun, feeling it warm your blood and breathe light into your soul, telling me that our skin is meant to be bronzed because it is the Earth’s kiss to us
Maybe we would learn to bake cookies American-style
like a real grandma and granddaughter,
extra butter and flour stuck underneath our fingernails.
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Disha Ram is a performer, writer, and creative from Little Rock, Arkansas. She attends Little Rock Central High School, where she is a rising senior. Her poetry has received 3 Scholastic Regional Gold Keys, and she is the Media Chair of the Teen Advisory Board of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts where she utilizes her writing skills to provide arts accessibility to youth communities in Arkansas. Outside of writing, her interests lie in the performing arts. She has seven years of Indian classical vocal training and performed the National Anthem for multiple school events such as football and soccer games. She is an inducted member of Troupe 6418, her school’s Thespian Honor Society, and has authored and assisted in writing several original school plays and productions. Disha also founded a non-profit project, Harmony Heals, where she leads a group of youth performers in hosting events with the ticket funds going to local free-healthcare facilities in Arkansas and worldwide. Through her writing, she aspires to harmonize her Indian and American identities and become a source of representation to Asian-American authors and readers everywhere.