Poetry: “Dyspepsia” by Akhila Pingali
Akhila Pingali takes the idea that the body retains a one’s history a step further with the idea of “gastrointestinal memory” in her poem “Dyspepsia.” Simultaneously, she speaks directly to the body’s discomfort and animates it in the form of a rabbit that lives inside the body. The speaker’s response to the rabbit progresses over time. The comfort of a hotel stay with friends and an earlier attempt to shoot a tahr, an animal related to sheep and goats, tells us something about how this persistent ailment impacts the speaker’s whole lived experience. Even the descriptive, packed-in language of the poem contributes to this, and while the poem ends, there isn’t necessarily a resolution.
Read Pingali’s poetry below.
Dyspepsia
Rank rabbit in my throat, raring to hop and skedaddle. It’s as if I never
moved on. You rise like huge gaps in my gastrointestinal memory to
dissipate in a bad smell, yesterdays thrashed to rot. Some effervescence
is deemed necessary to remind bodies what they’ve done for decades.
What decades have done to them. Though that’s already registered, my
ineptitude in digesting has never made you sick. It falls on me to purge,
oh, this dear rabbit, so dear to me. No one coddles my insides like that,
and that is not to say the heart. There is more to a physiology than my body
ensconced in the plush righteousness of good friends, everything sinking
deliciously—stiff muscles into pillows, corned feet into fuzz slippers,
which, then, further into hotel corridor furnishings. His bob-tail tickles my
duodenum and I choke back a sneeze. Involved are several glands, trigger-
happy—already I overtaxed the ones in the eyes. One thing about me is
I must account for excess, so I channelled it into great gulps that scalded
the throat. This was before I swallowed the animal. Before I went on that
Himalayan cleanse where we were told to shoot tahr and think of them
as you. Whether I make a grand markswoman, we shall never know. Back
under the coast’s thick air, I bought balloons by the shore from a peddler
beloved by children, with his vuvuzelas and light-up yoyos. I released
about twenty of them—but nothing so fancy as helium. Anyway, all they did
was take the wind out of me and gambol along the sandy beach adding
to excess I can’t reconcile. I like to imagine a fiddler crab popped one, letting
my stitched breath into the wild. I like to imagine the tahr drowsy in velvet grass,
their corpses no use to me. Past the uvula I reach, find two long ears and pull.
Akhila Pingali
Akhila Pingali (she/her) is a research scholar who also teaches Spanish in Hyderabad, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in South Carolina Review, trampset, Euonia Review, Midway Journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Stanchion Zine, SoFloPoJo, BRUISER, etc. You can find her on Twitter @AkhilaPingali.
