Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In his book of essays published last week, Of Color (McSweeney’s, 2020), Jaswinder Bolina writes about his experiences as a poet and as part of the Desi community, “those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Afghani, Sri Lankan, and Nepalese descent.” He notes in the essay “Color Coded” that those who fear losing opportunities because of “the arrival of minorities where they haven’t been permitted or expected before” are missing the point: “To see evidence of a systemic conspiracy in a person of color’s ascension to any position once held exclusively by white people, exclusively for white people, is to mistake the outlier for the system.” In this poem, the speaker desires not to be the first at something, a token, meaning that other Sikh haven’t regularly done it, but part of an experience that becomes routine, “the 23rd turbaned astronaut setting out / to be the 239th man on the moon.” As someone who’s become obsessed with space flight lately, I admire how Bolina imagines its future and our future, one in which we—a much more inclusive we—regularly jet to other planets.
(Please note: we’ll feature an interview with Bolina about this poem and his latest book on the blog tomorrow!)
Waiting My Turn
I keep telling Hillary how I’d rather be
the 23rd turbaned astronaut setting out
to be the 239th man on the moon
than the first, in my hand-me-down
helmet and navy-blue pressure suit
lifted quick over the coast of Arizona,
the interns yawning at their stations
in the humdrum easy of ground control,
my khaki rocket routinely returning
to rest on its pad, wiser, more worldly
for its exertion, but when it says, Boy,
I seen everything now, boys, to the shiny new
rockets, they’re gassing up, readying
for Neptune, thinking, The moon??
Everybody’s been to the goddamn moon,
while I am 239,000 miles away, stepping
out of my blanched canister onto the lethal grit
of the goddamned moon, crowing, At last,
it’s my fucking turn at last.
Jaswinder Bolina is author of the essay collection Of Color (McSweeney’s, 2020); the poetry collections The 44th of July (Omnidawn, 2019), Phantom Camera (New Issues, 2013), and Carrier Wave (Center for Literary Publishing, 2006); and the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2014). His poems and essays have appeared widely in the US and abroad and have been collected in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry and The Norton Reader. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami.
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