I am born.

At my bedside, swirling colors and ripe fruit.

There are cherry tomatoes, concord grapes, fresh plums.

I eat and eat and eat.

I take my body everywhere.

It grows plump on the summer peaches.

I wear the clothes gifted to me by dead friends and relatives.

I taste what falls on its way down: loved ones, futures, homelands.

I practice buoyancy.

In water, the weight feels small.

What swells from my garden, I eat.

Nisha Atalie is a poet of South Asian and European descent from the Pacific Northwest. She is a poetry editor at MASKS and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in CALYX, Blood Orange Review, Tinderbox Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2021 Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize and received third place for the 2022 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. She lives on the occupied lands of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi (Chicago).