American-Indian Daughter-In-Law
She stands
before you—
your
daughter-in-law,
white-skinned,
sunset
pink touch
of hibiscus
on the
American snowfall.
A tap’s
air-water pressure
congests
your chest in its
prejudice
and beliefs
coil
around your belly;
snake
hisses acid bubbles.
She is
transformed, has
waxed away
her
customs,
falling from her
bit by bit
along
with the
curved black
hair on
her smooth legs.
She stands
before you
in the
nine-yard Saree
of your
ancestor’s traditions.
You’re
shocked. The
society
has footballed
you in its
opinions, stuffed
trash into
your lotus pink
tongue,
renowned for
its sweet
speech. A door
creeks
open. She’ll be
one of the
discarded
antiquities
in your attic,
unheard,
unspoken of…
Hollow & Empty
Your words
fragment
into
letters and
syllables
slip and fall
into this
phonetic
space,
never raise their
heads at
me except
in those
feeble threads
of
memories. I,
the
sarangi instrument
standing
before you
am space,
void.
Blow
through those
organs,
sensations fall
into
slumber, a
polar
bear’s hibernation
nothing
more than an
echo in a
cave or
a wind’s
commotion in
a tree
trunk. I stand
before you
to let those
scars
fabricate into
trails of
shooting stars in
the night
sky. I am
what I
am—Existence,
nothing
more than
~hollow
& empty~
Author’s
Bio: Nithya
Raghavan has finished her BBA at Heriot-Watt
University, Dubai. Her poems can be found on
www.poemhunter.com, www.fictionpress.com (Ghost of Words), Muse India, Kritya,
Asia Writes, Qarrtsiluni and Nether magazine. She has also published articles
for Nxg, The Hindu, Time Out, Abu
Dhabi, letters to the editor in Khaleej Times and Gulf
News and a column in Khaleej Times.
nice :)
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