Born in Ludhiana, India, and having lived in three East Coast cities, Sonia Arora searches for the right balm to cure her diasporic funk. She channels her angst by walking daily, and when the weather refuses to cooperate, she dances to Bhangra beats. Her writing has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Lunch Ticket, Rock Paper Poem, Elysium Review, Philadelphia Stories, and beyond. In her free time, Sonia fights fascism and makes rajma chawal. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and has received multiple grants for her teaching and artistic work, including from the New York Council on the Arts. While earning her MFA in Poetry at CUNY Queens College, she served as Managing Editor of The Queens Review. Her heart often finds home in the nook of nature. She’s the mamma of a 23-year-old graduate student in Philadelphia, and her husband, Raju, is a techie and rewilder.
Meditation On Invisibility
In the season of honeysuckle, weeping aspen takes me limb by limb under her canopy like a woman whose long locks shroud her face and chest. I hide there among her undulating roots and find a soft patch of soil – no one notices – here where the landscapers cut the grass of people no one sees. She lets me breathe her in – light making its way past dense, dark leaves. There she mends, jigsaw cracks of an organ that still beats but wavers in the world of dominant species. She takes my breath and makes it hers.
