Teja Sudhakar

Dredging

When I don’t cook
for days, a white fuzz gathers

around the bottoms
of my last good

tomatoes. The avocados frown
into their silver bowl.

These days, I search
for meaning

anywhere, in anything,
desperate as a housefly

bordering open fruit. As bees
around anything bright.

As a woman who wants
her daughters to swim

so badly that for months,
she wades into the green thick

of her pond, dredging up
rakefuls of rot. I want to mother

something like that,
want to want

something bad enough
to scrape it

from the inside
out. But I find peace

instead—maybe,
too much of it.

I slice off the white
furs, dip my saltines

into days-old soup.
In my palm, the avocado skin

falls away in one clean
swoop. Even with all the soft

parts, the bad flesh
I cleave, I still work

my way
to the seed.

It grins
through its rot,

like a pearl.

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Teja Sudhakar is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. A native of Chennai, India, and long-time resident of Lexington, Kentucky, their work explores queer and immigrant narratives of the transnational South. Teja’s work has been published with The Academy of American Poets, Georgia Review, Salt Hill Journal and others. They live and write in Riverwest, Milwaukee with their cat, Soup.