Two Poems by Misha Ponnuraju

"Rewatching You've Got Mail with my mom on what would've been her wedding anniversary"

Truthfully, neither of us are really watching. 

The muted glow of the screen is a formality,

the filling of space where a husband would be.

Nora would set the scene differently. 

The fireplace would still be on, yes,

but perhaps the dogs would curl up closer to the flame,

less afraid of this foreign, manufactured warmth.

Instead of the empty space by our feet, 

there’s a brown mahogany coffee table, 

bearing the glamour of half-filled ice cream cartons, 

the grace of Kleenex and leftover Chinese take-out.

In Nora’s version, the daughter would still be a child

first learning about the magic of New York in the fall, 

of a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils. 

In Nora’s version, the mother and daughter would seek shelter 

beneath the same blanket,

perhaps a quilt that some off-screen grandmother knitted them 

with brittle hands and tougher love. There would be an earlier scene,

a conversation about the necessity of beloved, created things, 

and now we see the pay-off of her wisdom, 

And later, some movie critic could deem a symbol

upon this domesticity: a quilt, which visually signifies

that at our worst, we are some patchwork fastened together

by love and our best efforts and what our mothers remember,

and yes, we can be kept warm even with all our tattered edges 

This quilt, maybe a composition of medium-sized squares

of her old dresses and bedsheets, or our late grandfather’s

Hawaiian shirts and Christmas sweaters, signs of a life 

that will exist before and after this period of marital loss,

see, here we will wrap ourselves in our history, 

in this legacy of love of which we are mere chapters,

of course, we will be okay --- 

But there is no quilt here. My grandma doesn’t quilt -- she is dead. The fire is dying, and there’s no ice cream. You, my mother, were not hungry on the evening of your would-be anniversary. I fell asleep halfway through this viewing, and you went to the computer to research quitclaim deeds.

When I wake up, I realize that there is no elegance in mourning. 

This evening would always be an emptiness in the middle of all of our nothing days. 

When I awaken, the hero has language for romance that I have no grammar for,

a life of videotape rentals and dinner and as long as we both shall live. 

this promise to embrace the ordinary and each other.

And I am awake for somewhere over the rainbow and kisses in the park

and I am awake now and I’m crying but suddenly there is a quilt beside me

and dogs curled up by the fire and suddenly my stomach is full of Chinese food and ice cream and suddenly I am young again in my mother’s arm and

we are together. 

"Sumpahan: Moonfall: Waltz"

We stood quiet beneath the super flower blood moon, 

quiet in its red shadow. I am warned against bathing

in this darkness but instead I escort my past outside 

to witness that which purges us. 

I am asked to let go, to step boldly into 

the emptiness I can create my life within.

I can’t exorcize this time. Nowadays, we awaken from 

our childhood bedrooms and wear our veils of mourning. 

we record our nightmares and sharpen our knives before

the afternoon wanes. I let go of the promise

of tomorrow, my mother’s dreams in 

the garbage disposal called America.

I let go of a life I don't have to fight for 

with tooth and bone, a fairytale ending 

that doesn’t end with an axe in a wolf. 

---

MISHA PONNURAJU (she/her) is a Malaysian American writer and photographer from San Bernardino, California. She is an MFA candidate at the Ohio State University, where serves as the Associate Managing Editor at The Journal. She was also a Roots.Wounds.Words Creative Nonfiction Fellow. She is the recipient of the 2025 Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Poetry. Her writing explores conceptions of home, belonging, and love within the apocalypse. Find her work at Poets.org, Haymarket Books, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, the anthology Fractured Encounters, and forthcoming in The Shade Journal. You can follow her online at @anothermishap.