Two Poems in Pyrta

In the winter issue of pyrta, one of the finest journals of poetry in India, are two poems by me and lots of poems by lots of other absolutely wonderful writers.

The poems are below.

Clean-Up

Shall we talk of spaces?
If I leave, will you notice
That there is more space in this world?
I want your memory of me
To fill you up and empty you.
When you cry, I want you to wonder
If the tears are mine or yours
(They will be mine).

I want you to keep every trace I left behind –
The coughed-up phlegm, the clipped toenail ends,
The peeled gas stove skin.
I want to be couched in your love-songs
Like tacky metaphors.
I want you to stare out of train windows
Agonising over women who look like me,
Mapping the shape of my mouth on the fogged glass,
Mourning the moles and crevices on my body,
Missing them more than you miss me.

Sometimes, I worry
That if my chest were to split open
And blood to squirt out of my marrow,
You would simply wash the cushions
With your dirty laundry.
I want to be more than a stubborn stain
That your drycleaner will soak in alcohol.

When my eyeballs are crystallised for the blind,
I fear that you will not recognise them
In the sockets of the men you meet.
You will make a stranger out of me yet.

Will you pick out pieces of my flesh from a wreckage
Without gloves on your hands
And not santise your hands afterward?
Will you taste my ashes after I am cremated
And remember the caffeine-and-rum taste of my tongue?
Will you catalogue the endless shapes
That the tea-leaves form in my teacup,
Divining my future?
No. I think you will open the dishwasher.

Forget cigarette stubs and tea leaves
And tempests in teapots.
Will you evaporate my sweat from the sofa?
Will you rinse away my spit from the sink?
Will you vacuum my fallen hairs from the carpet?
Will you deodorise my scent from our bed?

What will you do?
Will you sluice me out of your life
With your dishwashers and vacuum cleaners
And into the drainage system where dirty things go?

Or will you keep my picture
On the refrigerator?

Scarface

Watch the geometry of my anger:
This blank white canvas,
That chord that breaks into unseen tributaries,
These diagonals that stave off without edges.
There are no circles, squares and hexagons,
There are no closed figures.
Mathematically speaking, I am open, mutable,
I have a beginning and an end.
Topographically speaking, I am formless,
An unpaid custodian of an unknown legacy.
My face is a library of scars that seethe with stories,
Windy, sharp breath
That feels like thunderclaps of metal and memory.
This metal is fresh and cold and hard,
Devoid of rust, untouched by fire.

I want these stories to cloud over your joys.
Never be happy.
Never smile.
Never dance in the rain.
Never feel joy without witnessing the oasis of my sorrows.
Let my tragedies annul your desires.
Be kidnapped by hate, seduced by revenge.
Don’t have children.
Don’t bring them into this world.
Instead, produce an anger like mine
And incubate it for years.
Never rip its umbilical cord.
Let it glide across your anatomy
And poison your dreams.

These words are not poems,
They are daggers in the shapes of commas and full-stops.
Don’t call me victim. I hate that word.
Don’t pity me until you have suffered like me.
I’d rather languish in impermanence
Than be remembered for this.

There are a thousand ways
In which I can be free,
But I have mixed ketchup with freedom
(And when I say ketchup, I mean blood)
And the sauce of that mix
Gives me more solace than forgiveness.

I am not so broken that I cannot be fixed,
I can be sold in a second-hand shop
At half price.
But I’d rather dance on skulls
And find a scale of measurement for pain.

I too long to be anchored in sweetness
And encircled by that thing that you call love.
But I am not one for circles
(And I hate squares).
How do I forget
The stories of my scars?

(c) Manasi Subramaniam