Tara Menon
Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She was a finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award 2023/2024. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Adanna Literary Journal, Arlington Literary Journal, A Plate of Pandemic, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Cider Press Review. She is also a published short story writer. Her latest fiction appeared in Pennsylvania Literary Journal.
A Suite for Love
The earwigs congregate in the middle of the night
on the carpet of my mother’s bedroom.
Ten elders disrespecting the peace of a nonagenarian,
undermining the efforts of her daughter
to give her a luxurious palatial suite free of troubles.
Her daughter likes to ruminate that Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal
for his favorite wife, the brilliant, beautiful Mumtaz
and, similarly, she bestowed, a decade ago, a spacious bedroom
with a bay window and an appealing elderly-friendly bathroom to her mother.
What we do for love is flex our creative selves.
We spare no expense whether it’s building the Taj Mahal
or a suite that costs as much as a mansion elsewhere in the U.S.
My mother, she who was afraid and squeamish of insects,
unwilling to disturb me, steels herself
to pick up earwigs with toilet paper and flush them away.
Whenever I’m around, I haul out the central vacuum’s hose
to suck the sneaky invaders.
My guilty conscience reasons that animals defend their territory
and I’m defending my mother’s.
The ghost of poor Shah Jahan must have haunted the grounds of the Taj Mahal,
watching once-upon-a-time picnickers with their hammers
chip agate and carnelian from the magnificent façade.
My mother tries to make me feel better.
I’ll try to see God in these earwigs, she says.
