parking lot

shouting / the same words but in different languages

Meghana Mysore

Poem

May 4, 2023

in the dream’s afterglow
there is only my father and me
we stand apart in a parking lot
bathed in darkness, shouting
the same words but in different languages
so neither of us can hear

Meghana Mysore, from Portland, Oregon, is an Indian American writer and a 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San José State University. Her work appears or will appear in Apogee, Passages North, The Yale Review, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, wildness, Boston Review, The Margins of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the anthology A World Out of Reach (Yale University Press). A Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction and a Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference Scholar, she has also received recognition from Tin House, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and The de Groot Foundation, through which she was a finalist for the 2023 LANDO Grant. She holds a B.A. in English with Distinction from Yale University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She is working on a novel exploring three generations of an Indian American family, an excerpt of which appears in Pleiades.

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