Review by Aline Soules
God is a river running down my palm
by Jeremy Ra and Aruni Wijesinghe
Picture Show Press
August 2024, Paperback, 47 pages
This chapbook is a collaboration between a Sri-Lankan-American “project manager, ESL teacher, former sous chef and occasional belly dance instructor” and a self-described “Chinese-Korean-American poet living in Los Angeles.” What do they have in common? They’re poets, some of their work has appeared in the same or similar journals, and both have been nominated for Best-of-the-Net and the Pushcart Prize.
They met in a workshop offered by Eric Morago, and they engaged in “magical conversations.” Even Ra is “startled” to see the similar motifs that resulted in their poems, even though they didn’t consult each other while writing them and even though their voices are not the same. Ra calls their process “mining from the same overarching consciousness.”
In one way, this is not surprising. Poetry offers universality, and the importance of this chapbook lies in how two very different people—in background, ethnicity, gender, perception, and voice—convey this universality. Not just in theme, but in desire.
Wijesinghe opens the collection with “On Las Ramblas, You Stop to Take a Photo,” in which “we plant red geraniums,” “whitewash the house,” and while “the dust still settles / into the stucco, [mark] the time // since you last said you imagine me / my younger self.” In the memory of a “girl / on the platform,” the “I” of the poem is “a girl in love / with fate’s rolled dice.”
The next poem, Ra’s “Eyes Full of Moon,” is addressed to Richard, and desire oozes through what the “I” did and did not tell Richard. One night in Prague, “I kept walking / the cobblestoned streets—all the red lights // seemed intent on speaking.” The opposite of the “I”s reticence. Then, the “I” envies the moon: “That it can fade to nothing // yet get full again.” He ends with
What we didn’t say that day
is why glass beads are frozen
on the moon.
One of Ra’s strengths is the constant twists in his poetry—what is said, what is unsaid, what is desired, what is held at bay.
The poems do not alternate between Wijesinghe and Ra but fit together according to theme and the mix of their backgrounds reveals itself continually.
we mingle English and Sinhala
our open mouths bold enough to eat
two worlds at once (“we slip on a dark skin of words)
Wijesinghe and Ra’s response to this poem, “Barley Hill,” a term that after the Korean War referred to the period in late spring when South Korea ran out of rice before the spring barley was harvested.
No, it’s not that I remember—
It’s that I cannot forget.
This barley, this steaming,
unreasonable need to live.
All the blood shed for the feast.
In “Killing Time,” Wijesinghe and friends listen to CDs, and sit in bean bag chairs. There is “boozy laughter,” and they “stay up all night…inconsequential / time irrelevant against our immortality.”
Jeff, Ron and I cocooned in our truth
of friendship unchanged, ever young
as the bright face of the moon rising
over Blockbuster Video on Wilshire.
In “Boys Sleeping,” Ra meets another boy and everything they do hints of or is explicit about sex.
…We walk home seemingly
together, stumble into booths
where we spend more than our allowances
on sticker pictures that we paste
to the back of our hidden diaries…
They find ways “to walk home together.” They “invent a science / project” that enables the “I” to “sleepover on a twin bed.” The “I”s response is to “see my veins glow // in a way they shouldn’t.” He references a time when “flesh was mere wound, / the layer beneath the skin housing // a map of vessels.” He ends:
The world won’t hear us, but the night
remembers this breath that shrouded
boys with the bluest veins.
These poems pulse with sex, with love, with desire. The last poem is Ra’s: “My Gal Mary.” Here Mother and the Virgin Mary co-mingle. Mother acquires a statue of the Virgin Mary—the external co-mingling. But the internal co-mingling comes when Mary “learned to work with the other gods, / a machine of wish delegation” and the poem explodes to Mother and Mary and all gods. As poem unfolds, “mother took most of the gods with her / overseas, but not Mary, / who ended where I began. Now the “I” is drawn in, thinks about freeing the statue, but “lose[s] heart.” The statue stays on “my godless shelves.” In the end, Mary
knows I share her pulse / against my will,
who knows what it’s like to bear
but a likeness
to what is really sought.
Desire propels these poets forward, seeking, always seeking what the reader comes to suspect will never fully be reached.
About the reviewer: Aline Soules’ work has appeared in such publications as the Kenyon Review, Houston Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Galway Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her book reviews have been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review, and others. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Find Aline online at: https://alinesoules.com