Originally published by Black Heart Magazine: https://blackheartmagazine.com/2016/01/03/2-poems-by-kristen-hoggatt-abader/
Volunteer Archive
The Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Archive, JFK Library, Boston
File 20, 1965, Tucson
sends Dan off to Iran
with a farewell parade.
Flags alight
in the paper trail,
fragments yawn,
and the mad bloodhound
sniffs the un-there,
fills the gaps with fiction.
File 5, 1973, Afghanistan:
Mary takes refuge
in fried kach aloo,
gains 20 pounds.
The nationals sing,
“Maqbul”— the folds
of skin that hang over
her jeans. She grunts
to get faux leather
over chubby calves
before she goes to class.
She maneuvers
before a hand mirror,
checking her new body
post bucket-bath.
File 6, 1974, Konduz:
The English teachers
don’t speak English
outside of Kabul,
but how Amy loves
to improve her Dari.
Her spiral notebook
sits by her side as she drinks
tea with her new friends.
She communicates
with high-pitched
bolalar in their games,
and with bobo
walking his goat.
Even though she won’t
talk to the whore
who lives across the street
(the clients also knock
on her door),
Amy thinks she’s
a good mother.
File 21, 1966, Karachi:
Frank’s engineering degree
serves him well as he
designs a storm shelter.
Most volunteers, he brags,
can’t do anything
but teach health or English.
A stout building,
two miles inland
from the Bay of Bengal,
a white fortress, specks
of off-white gray.
File 15, (undated), India:
The rural women
have crooked faces,
mouths agape,
sweat originating
from the far-away
skin beyond the veil,
saris stained as they sit
on the dirt kitchen floor,
grinding seeds
into a powder
so weightless
a pale dust shades
the surface of their
exposed wrists.
The women chat,
sharing recipes,
lesson plans,
who slept with whom,
how to remove blood
from a white cotton gown,
or how to make tea
when there is no gas.
(Unfiled) Uzbekistan, 2003:
I can’t sleep when I drink
too much—
I hear the shatter
of vodka under my bed
in Jizzakh,
feel the burn
when insomnia
or help-me sick or
the dullest cold
made me piss
in the corner of the yard,
the house’s shadow cast
long over my bare skin.
Aya is grinding cumin for osh,
crying that word
we used for Maxlio,
“mischievous,”
that I forgot.
Zarif-opa’s washing
the family clothes
in a bucket, hanging them
out to dry over winter frost.
At 3 a.m. after
I’ve drunk too much,
I scream into the night,
That dark thing,
that dark thing…
filling the crevices of
Uzbekistan’s wake.
The tongue fails,
a tossed tub of Word Yahtzee,
leaving nothing
but the aphorisms of
MISS and ACHE.