Aimee Nezhukumatathil

cantfindit

Aimee Nezhukumatathil (1974-present) is a Filipina South Indian poet from Chicago, Illinois. She received her BA and MFA from Ohio State University and has won a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts among other awards. She is the author of the collection Oceanic, Lucky Fish, and Miracle Fruit as well as the chapbook Lace & Pyrite and the upcoming book of illustrated nature essays World of Wonder. Source

Letter to the Northern Lights

The light here on earth keeps us plenty busy: a fire
in central Pennsylvania still burns bright since 1962.

 

Whole squads of tiny squid blaze up the coast of Japan
before sunrise. Of course you didn’t show when we went

 

searching for you, but we found other lights: firefly,
strawberry moon, a tiny catch of it in each other’s teeth.

 

Someone who saw you said they laid down
in the middle of the road and took you all in,

 

and I’m guessing you’re used to that—people falling
over themselves to catch a glimpse of you

 

and your weird mint-glow shushing itself over the lake.
Aurora, I’d rather stay indoors with him—even if it meant

 

a rickety hotel and its wood paneling, golf carpeting
in the bathrooms, and grainy soapcakes. Instead

 

of waiting until just the right hour of the shortest
blue-night of the year when you finally felt moved

 

enough to collide your gas particles with sun particles—
I’d rather share sunrise with him and loon call

 

over the lake with him, the slap of shoreline threaded
through screen windows with him. My heart

 

slams in my chest, against my shirt—it’s a kind
of kindling you’d never be able to light on your own.

Published:

2016

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Humor & Satire

Joy & Praise

Love & Relationships

Nature

Poetic Form

Science & Climate

Literary Devices:

Apostrophe

an exclamatory passage in a speech or poem addressed to a person (typically one who is dead or absent) or thing (typically one that is personified)

Asyndeton

the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence

Couplets

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

Epistolary

(of a literary work) in the form of letters

Epistrophe

the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses

Imagery

visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work