Ghazal for Longing

I searched the whole city for an edge to scrape off my polemic of longing.
I was sick then, my distended belly knifed with razor-sharp longing.

When I was born, it was different. A dull throb was the only symptom
of my lovesick heart. I wore it on my cheek, an oozing sore of longing.

Time made me belly-weak, good things good until tainted.
Every knotted breath was a harbinger of disaster, sorrow prolonging

my heartache, whose genesis I could not define or defy.
I became the priestess of pain, I studied the hypothesis of longing.

I called it a framework, or praxis, or mother wound theory.
Conception was the suture to a mother’s unearned longing

for a child, a perfect child, a glam child, a child who unearths envy —
yet becomes the wreckage of death drive, sex drive, men’s longing.

I wanted an emetic, an exorcism, but instead I made sorrow my sobriquet 
to rebel against life’s glass gifts that urged me to get over my longing

for another psyche, another window to display my empty, obedient heart.
I understood that even the desire to be hollow is a type of longing.

So I tried on a new spirituality, like a shoe. I called my own name in prayer: Swati. 
History’s root is “story.” This is invocation. Summoning. My own belonging.

My Uncle Told Me I Was His

Favorite: his whiskers in my ears, tickling my
neck, he told me I was his first and only

Baby: his love pointed on me like a magnifying
glass on an ant, I licked milk sweets off his

Fingers: he used to roll paan into his betel red mouth.
I wasn’t allowed one, but I knew the taste from his

Breath: pressing my ears on door, Sunday cartoons low,
standing on tiptoe with my brother, asking for a

Story: he showed me photos of his girlfriend, asked
if I’d like her to be my auntie, I said yes but he

Married: a different bride, I popped the wedding 
balloons and I almost told her about the other

Bride: she had a baby who I held and loved though
she peed down my arm, which smelled like their

Father: who got smaller and fatter, but I claimed
a corner of his lap that never changed, until my

Grandpa: died and I forgot he was my uncle’s dad,
so my grief was nothing next to his, but still I

Cried: in another country, in another language
sent voicemails asking what they ate, how is

His Family: the ocean got wider, I never nested nor
popped out a baby. I made no home for his old love.

An Ordinary Day

Met C the day I finished licking the guestbook clean. When I cleared my debt 
to evil, I began to see the soul in stagnant things. To feel the smallness
of my grief. Like a sky done weeping. Like a needle vacuumed up. 

Fell for C the way one falls into a mouth. Thought to study love by falling in love. 

The borderless zone between romance and worship became a mosh pit 
of denied pain, despite my search for rapture. Venus stationed direct as
I ate every rose he gave me with its thorns. I convinced myself that love is an act 

of putting a god back together. Of snagging a worship forever. Oh tangled spider. 
Even as I strung him back to life, I woke up to thoughts of his funeral. His body 
going into a hole in a line of holes. Death in a place of death made it banal. 

A notable death happens on an ordinary day.

I left C on an ordinary day. Wept thorns down my face, until I resembled the intruder 
from my dreams whose face was scratched out, who I tried to kill, who I now summoned. I called that an epiphany. She loves the way I love a knifed sky on a foggy morning. 

The sun will never avoid specifically me.

This piece is part of the Summer 2026 issue.