A Lotus was once a Womb

A Lotus was once a Womb

Today Co-star says: you are not a tragedy/ be a poem.

If astrology only maps the stars / their diaspora & displacement/

who will remember/ that an overseas voyage

made every woman in my tree/ the crescent lady/

hovering in the bend of a crescent moon/ i must recall my history this way/

reaching for me when I am too old to ask: where did our mothers come from?

/dear girl/

To be haunted, the ghosts must remember you first/ i call them by name/

at once/ they drift further/sending me away/

aren’t you lonely/ without your daughters?

don’t you care /how beautiful/ your liminality has grown/ outside of you?

stay a moment/ i beg/ watch the body draw itself / from its limbless stem/ wandering

into the light/ as amoeba/ Remember/ you were your own shape once/ then your mother’s fossil.

Maybe this separation/ is puritanical/ the diasporic belly/ water borne legs/

fish-like/ Our first grief inspires the creation of nerves/ brain/ and spine/

but what else?

In sickness/ i dream to be reborn of a lotus/ erupting from

a moon’s smudged reflection/ hoping

i will regrow softer/ quieter

/dear girl/

her muddy womb/ cannot bring you home/

cannot shape India/ into a grandmother/

who loves you/ this is your fate.

At the tail end of a dream/ your first breath/

still drips like diamond pools/ scattering inside the tiny mouths

of ghosts/ resurfacing.

Remember/ the mountains once had wings /

until Indra removed them / this too is diaspora.

When the ghosts don’t remember you/ it stings to raise your voice/ above a whisper/

in fear they will drown / your memory thin & shifting like water

Perhaps, we are all haunted/ by other women’s absence/

breaking our backs/ to clutch the same moon in our throats

/spines on fire.

i am tired of rising/ when everything else falls

from the sky/ pale & griefless

A woman holds the tide in my mouth/ like a debt

i cannot tell you which mother

the weight of this gravity/ pulls from.