Avni Vyas
Introduced by Heather Sellers
Florida-based poet AvniVyas is intellectually playful, wildly associative, mythic, and often very funny. She has a particular gift for putting things that don’t ordinarily belong together into the same imaginative field: science and mythology, Florida wildlife and Hindu gods, pop culture and metaphysics, eros and botany, jokes and profound loss. “The Goddess Saraswati in Chemistry Class” is essentially a poem about the failure of these categories. The speaker is sixteen, caught between scientific taxonomy and erotic perception, and the poem keeps collapsing the two Biology isn’t just biology. A teacher isn’t just a teacher. A flower isn’t just a flower. Scientific observation isn’t separate from erotic observation. Myth isn’t separate from adolescent experience. The body cannot be completely understood by looking at it.
There’s a wonderful irony in the title of this poem: Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge, learning, music, speech, and the arts. And in this poem a young woman is discovering that knowledge is not the same thing as understanding. In her body of work, Vyas is often interested in what happens when the supposedly objective language of science encounters the unruly body. Her poetry frequently brings Hindu mythology and other mythic systems into conversation with ordinary contemporary life. Krishna, Shiva, Vishnu, Ekalavya, Charon, Saturn, and other gods and mythic figures aren’t treated as remote cultural artifacts; they’re active imaginative presences that help the speaker understand grief, family, sexuality, identity, mortality and place.
The Goddess Saraswati in Chemistry Class
TIn Biology, Mr. Camellia’s fly’s open, and I’m sixteen,
in the front row of the performance. Who notices?
Not him, numbering the molecules it takes to build a universe.
I’m stunned: the real possibility and other life
contained inside his pants, its myopic gaze fixed on us.
The pendulum inside the motor inside the whirrs
of my cells says look away for the same reason
I flicker when we slice open a daylily,
examining pistil, stamen, plucking midrib, rolling
the throat between our fingers. Eros clamoring
in the recitation: sepal, calyx, pollen. Bulb stems,
and polysexed catcall of color, femme to the touch,
stretched taut along the stalk. Mr. Camellia scrapes
the periodic table poster. It’s cockeyed and poised
for its eventual refractory period, its fading ink.
But I have to look, and when his fabric winks open,
all that sees me is darkness, any ridge or wrinkle
is imaginary, like my name in the folds of skirts.
I do what great scientists should—
I imagine the beast stuffed, stretched mid-pounce,
but really looking now, there’s a corner, maybe
a shadow, and like all good myths, it avoids a cold unveiling.
And like the first life the HMS Beagle must have encountered,
the flowers opened to show their stigmas, pursed little mouths,
yellow stripes down the petals’ bodies, glyphs spelling
proto-sexual requests, the unmistakable croon and croak of wind.
But Mr. Camellia’s yet to realize what I see—the bizarre
marriage of clothes to skin. When we laugh at him later
I’ll consider my own wonder stitched into that dark,
about what blooms between my thighs when I fall asleep,
how unhesitant its shape, its capacity for warmth. How gullible.
Avni Vyas has published three collections: Little God (2021), Far From Glorious Feeling (2021), and When I Was a Barefoot Cloud (2024).
Heather Sellers is the author of Field Notes from the Flood Zone (BOA Editions) and You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, a memoir about her experience as a person with face blindness. Her most recent book is How to Make Poems: Form and Technique. She directs the creative writing program at the University of South Florida.
Thank you for reading Volume 4, Number 5!
Thank you to our Guest Editor, Catherine Abbey Hodges, author of Empty Me Full (Gunpowder Press, 2025), Raft of Days (Gunpowder Press, 2017), and the winner of the inaugural Barry Spacks Poetry Prize, Instead of Sadness (Gunpowder Press, 2015).
And thank you to our additional readers for this issue, both exceptional poets: Laure-Anne Bosselaar and M.L. Brown.
