Mira as Victim Typology
Mira at the dining table clutching her kneecaps, knuckles cockling each mound of bone, the dulled blood of bruise flattened to the golden purple of Ammi’s aubergine fritters. Mira with her teeth opalescent like freshly peeled garlic for Ammi’s chicken liver curry. Mira with her mouth hotter than the stomach of Ammi’s kitchen stove. Mira with her tongue folded inside the chest of this dumb heat; kneaded bread, the wet wheat of a burning thickness. Mira with the lazy shipwreck of her hips, her eyes full of biblical flood – twin animals of her new breasts – a roomful of mongoose-haired Noahs to ark her extinction. Mira with her thighs pinked to skinned snakes, the cusp of pubis and a birthmark carved out from difficult fruit. Mira with her eyes of ichor melting above the coal-mines, pupils coked with datura and milk. Mira with a nose as crooked as a witch’s footprint. Mira with her lips like abandoned mail trains. Mira with her dream of gardens where she can sleep herself into the stupor of roses, a song rising from her skin as if a bird made of petrichor circling the musk of mud.
Mira, after father's radiation therapy.
In a hospital, God is a scar tissue. A dog breathes as if a slur slipping off
my drunk uncle’s tongue. I place the poem between a prayer and a profanity.
Here is the plucked rooster of my mouth, redder than an exit wound.
Here are the crows blacker than my grandmother’s misspelled tattoos.
I swallow the root of turmeric. Stuff my cheeks with cupful of cardamoms.
Here’s to homemade antidotes, a halt in the hell of motion sickness. Purge
the vomit with goatmilk & camphor oil. Chew the marigold off the garland
coiled around his photograph like a sedated viper. Mourning fills the gaps
in my memory in an inexact dose of steroids. Any absence creates
the illusion of closeness. A callus grows on my big toe and I séance
the cratered fiction of skin with the pinprick of a hairclip. When
the cancer came, his cells dominoed as if a cheap loss in a game of tetris.
His lung x-rayed in a charcoal map of the Andaman. Summer tiptoed
a month later than usual. The henna green swirl of my skirt had stilled itself
by then. My mother’s anklets divorced their bells, were unhooked, shoved deep
into the throat of a mango wood cupboard. Every evening we sat on the porch
-swing in his hand-built pagoda. The obi of darkness rearranging
the geometry of our grief. The fingertips of java plum trees elongated
with the extempore of parrots. My mother’s eyes as bloodshot as their beaks.
These birds never leave home, she said. They’d turn feral and empty out any tree.
They’d rust a cage with the clockwork of mimicry. But they stayed.
No diaspora clings to their wingspan. No pilgrimage across the arbor vitae
of hemispheres. So, we sat back and let the green venery wrap the dusk
in an epilogue of plumes. Our hands cupping the storm whispering
inside each teacup. Our bodies turning silver with rain.
my drunk uncle’s tongue. I place the poem between a prayer and a profanity.
Here is the plucked rooster of my mouth, redder than an exit wound.
Here are the crows blacker than my grandmother’s misspelled tattoos.
I swallow the root of turmeric. Stuff my cheeks with cupful of cardamoms.
Here’s to homemade antidotes, a halt in the hell of motion sickness. Purge
the vomit with goatmilk & camphor oil. Chew the marigold off the garland
coiled around his photograph like a sedated viper. Mourning fills the gaps
in my memory in an inexact dose of steroids. Any absence creates
the illusion of closeness. A callus grows on my big toe and I séance
the cratered fiction of skin with the pinprick of a hairclip. When
the cancer came, his cells dominoed as if a cheap loss in a game of tetris.
His lung x-rayed in a charcoal map of the Andaman. Summer tiptoed
a month later than usual. The henna green swirl of my skirt had stilled itself
by then. My mother’s anklets divorced their bells, were unhooked, shoved deep
into the throat of a mango wood cupboard. Every evening we sat on the porch
-swing in his hand-built pagoda. The obi of darkness rearranging
the geometry of our grief. The fingertips of java plum trees elongated
with the extempore of parrots. My mother’s eyes as bloodshot as their beaks.
These birds never leave home, she said. They’d turn feral and empty out any tree.
They’d rust a cage with the clockwork of mimicry. But they stayed.
No diaspora clings to their wingspan. No pilgrimage across the arbor vitae
of hemispheres. So, we sat back and let the green venery wrap the dusk
in an epilogue of plumes. Our hands cupping the storm whispering
inside each teacup. Our bodies turning silver with rain.
✱✱✱
| Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo Roma Jungian scarab moonlighting as a clinical psychologist. Her writing has been translated into multiple languages as well as featured in various digital and physical spaces and can be found in literary magazines, anthologies, international galleries, rehab centers and in the bios of okcupid users. Her digital collection of poems “Bone Tongue” was published by Thought Catalog Books and her full length poetry book “Father, Husband” was recently released by Salopress UK. Her next poetry pamphlet will be published by Pyramid Editions in 2017. She created and now curates a global dialogue on gendered violence & street harassment called "The Mira Project" and can also be found squeeing about militant bunnies atwww.viperslang.tumblr.com or @zaharaesque on twitter. |
