Poetry by Ujjvala Bagal Rahn

                 ​Paul Sableman CC



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GRIEF IN A FOLDING PURSE


When Al tells us 
his father John died yesterday
his face closes
like the petal pleats 
of a folding change purse
enclosing his grief
as he describes the man
who left his mother
with three children to raise
and made a new family.
Al searched for him 
for years of gray cotton fog
until his father emerged
they clasped hands
then John said, “I have to leave
walked away forever.

At seventeen, Charlie Ray
hid his grief within
his smooth face
his gentle voice. 
He said he’d start at Kroger
but when Tourette’s 
slammed him against walls
exploded from his mouth
they had to let him go.
Disabled by thirty-five
drunk with his friend
on New Year’s Eve
the purse fell open
curses zoomed, chairs fell, walls shook
until his friend stabbed and stabbed
and Charlie stopped. 

When we discuss the pounds 
of powder after cremation. 
I talk about my grandmother’s
Hindu funeral in America:
my father and nineteen men
my uncle, her oldest son
his back against one end
pressed her coffin into 
the crematorium oven.
We Hindus, we’re direct about death
but what I do not open 
is my own folding purse
where lies the little bag
of my infant son’s ashes. 

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Ujjvala Bagal Rahn’s Red Silk Sari (Red Silk Press, 2013) is her first collection of poems. Her work is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review and Illuminations Literary Magazine, and  has recently appeared in Frogpond, Bangalore Review and Third Wednesday. She was the featured poet in the inaugural broadcast of Poetry in the Air (Savannah State University). A semifinalist in the 2013 and 2018 Wisdom-Faulkner Competition, she was a Hambidge Center fellow in May 2020. She is the owner of Red Silk Press, a micropress of science fiction, science, poetry, and memoir. She lives with her husband and daughter in Savannah, GA.

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