Nandini Dhar

Portrait of the Poet as a Ghost

A woman
eyes big as an ostrich egg
her household
the staircase

married at eight
widowed at ten
sharpens her alphabets

the bricks on the attic wall her slate
erases them
as soon as they've been written

no-hair girl
in between the cracks of the floors

listen
for the sound of her eyes
flipping the pages of her father's books

mothers
do not wish your daughters her fingertips
forever stuck
in the middle of a page

mothers
keep your daughters away
lest they write down
 what you're sweeping away.                 

---

The Kitchen Goddess
     After Jibanananda Das and Rachelle Cruz

 
Lock the kitchen doors at night.

Your daughter isn't safe.

This pretty maiden.
Widowed at twelve. Who could never grow up.
Could not look at any woman's swollen belly.

Her ceaseless quest to grow up. And pretty maiden grows smaller. And smaller.

So small. She wriggles inside the cracks in the kitchen wall.

Mother, lock your kitchen doors.
Your daughter isn't safe.

Blisters on her palm.
Blood. Pus. Broken skin.
Pretty maiden washes rice.

Your daughter's tongue.
Isn't safe.

These blackened skillets on the sink.
These half-eaten mangoes. Un-chewed chicken bones.
Not enough. Pretty maiden scrubs.
And scrubs the pots. Sucks the blood.
Out of little girl tongues.

Mother, lock the kitchen doors at night.
Pretty maiden washes rice inside. Bleeding hands. Cannot stop.
Do not worry.
Her wrath would not break open what you lock up.

---

Playing Witch

It is your twelfth birthday yesterday,
and you refuse to begin to bleed.
Instead, you, my cousin, thick as a myth,
let loose your banyan root- hair –
broken twigs, polythene bags, newspaper pieces
whirling around your cheeks.
You swallow an owl, and do not even burp.
I am scared of nor'westers,
and you order me to quit painting toadstools blue.
A day ago, our grandmother had thrown away
a bowlful of Maggi noodles,
thinking they were overgrown maggots.
You and I picked them up,
sucked the eggs out of them,
then spat them out.
We are learning –
to wrest our tongues on the slippery.
You invite the crows to nest in your curls.
I am on my way to a hidden closure –
fish-hooked inside a rosewood box,
a hyacinth purple skirt to twirl.
Here, in the middle of the courtyard,
a face is what you sculpt for me –
a sharp half-moon, scythe shaped.
Like an obsolete poem.
I watch you through the keyhole.
Dust in your hair, dust on your tongue,
hands spread. The summer storm
between your fingertips.
You chew its brown feathers alive.




--
Nandini Dhar hails from Kolkata, India. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Potomac Review, PANK, Yellow Medicine Review, Pear Noir, and Southern Humanities Review. Her work has also been featured in the anthology The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Writing. She teaches postcolonial literature and gender studies at Florida International University, Miami and co-edits the online journal Elsewhere.