First Generation
By Roxanne Noor
PROMPT—Privilege ...
My father loves to recount coming to America,
trading the scorching Mumbai sun
for trudging through two feet of Iowa snow.
He boasts about saving fifty cents on bus fare
by walking five miles
with holes in his shoes,
the wet earth of a foreign country
beneath his economical rubbery feet.
My father slept on the linoleum floor for years
because he couldn't afford a mattress.
He worked in a hospital laundry room,
washed bloodied sheets &
cleaned others' emergencies.
He moved his cracked hands into
and out of suds of soap
again and again, with
a Sisyphean tenderness
nobody noticed.
He found a pointer finger in a sheet.
He got stuck by a needle.
He continued to work.
Good stories to laugh about
in retrospect, twenty years later.
How suffering, distilled
through enough time,
becomes folklore,
the thing you tell
at the dinner table
with a jocular warmth
that costs nothing now
but cost a great deal back then.
I still remember the years
of eating Spam with a fork
straight from the tin.
I can still recall my father’s late nights at work—
so late he slept at the office,
horizontal in the fluorescent hum
of an institution,
his dreams of Mumbai
keeping him warm.
The American Dream was accomplished.
The daughters went to college.
The mortgage was paid off.
My father speaks of suffering
like it's a must,
like there’s no other route to greatness,
like you can only move
by push.
He and I both know
every circumstance,
every blunder,
every passing phenomenon
(especially the things you don't want)
has the ability
to deepen you.
I'm four-leaf clover lucky
to be my father's daughter—
by watching him
shove and steer,
I've been gifted
the great privilege
to float.
Roxanne Noor is an Indian American writer and editor living on a small island in Thailand. She's the founder of Nude Studio, a magazine that views the human body as an extension of the land and inseparable from nature itself. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Mixed Mag, Sunstroke Magazine, Nymphs Journal, Uplift, and Full Potential Magazine.
