POEM OF THE MONTH
September
List
Entrainment by Derek Mueller
Diagnosis
I come from a long line of time travellers
—by which I mean, we all suffer from the chronic illness
of being elsewhere
—by which I mean, generations of gazes
locked on the yellow bird outside,
sipping from a puddle
that contains the whole muddy sky
—by which I mean at any moment,
I could be in a song, a mustard field, Calcutta 1856,
a lover’s arms or the spiral stair of a DNA helix
—by which I mean my grandfather, stuck
in an I do that did not fifty years ago
—by which I mean beds wet, sheets soiled,
and vegetables growing cities of bushy, white fungus
—by which I mean short salary slips, empty passbooks
and wallets thin with change
—by which I mean I have loved people
before I could set eyes on them
—by which I mean my second cousin sleeps on the floor
of his condo with thirty outlawed cats,
subsisting on crackers to afford kibble
—by which I mean adult friendships built on trading in spider facts
—and lost to human truths
told long after their time
—by which I mean grief is a country
and we are its most faithful immigrants
—by which I mean my uncle scrubs the sink at 2am
because microbes multiply overnight
—by which I mean a favourite spoon, a safe number
and a ritual squeeze of sanitizer before leaving home
—by which I mean our babies, born with their jaws pre-clenched
—by which I mean my little niece speaks of Egyptian queens
like she used to swallow pearls in vinegar with them
—I mean we’re always dancing across the double-edged blade of when
—I mean an obsession with stars and birth charts and
the constant dread of at least one calendar date
—the power to peek into ten futures and be paralysed by them all
—I mean speaking out of two mouths
with not enough room for a gasp
—I mean there are civilizations being blasted to smithereens
in my head
as I drink my morning coffee
—I mean the shrill song of here and now
always summons thunderclouds in my chest
Nikita Deshpande is an Indian poet, author and screenwriter, with poems in Paranoid Tree, Gulmohar Quarterly, The Prose Poem, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, and an anthology, The World That Belongs to Us. She won the 2023 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and a 2015 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship to work on her fiction.
I love how the constraint of the list poem allowed me to nail down the more slippery parts of the neurodivergent experience that are often left out of the black-and-white of test questions, symptoms and diagnostic labels. In the language of poetry, I found space to validate our struggles without making us a problem to be solved. Here, time can be whimsical, not punishing. The happy accident of this poem, for me, is that it reads like an infodump.
We received almost 600 list poems this month, and it was a delight to read many. I love list poems, and Nikita Deshpande’s “Diagnosis” wrecked me. This poem moves like a long exhale across generations, time zones, delusions, rituals, and what I can only call the quiet absurdities of survival. And yet nothing about it feels indulgent or messy. The accumulation is deliberate. The repetition of “by which I mean” begins as clarification, but quickly becomes its own heartbreak, like trying, over and over, to be understood.
I love how the poem navigates neurodivergence, ancestry, capitalism, and grief without naming any of them directly. Instead, we get “adult friendships built on trading in spider facts,” “wallets thin with change,” “babies born with their jaws pre-clenched.” Nikita’s voice balances lyric and wit, the sacred and ridiculous, building to a final image that floored me: “the shrill song of here and now / always summons thunderclouds in my chest.”
Like all good list poems “Diagnosis” doesn’t just list, it spirals, accumulates, insists. It’s a poem with at least twelve entry points and a thousand echoes.
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