because I cannot bury it, & in no particular order, the fable:
- because I cannot bury it, & in no particular order, the fable:
because I cannot bury it,
I pin my girlhood to my hair, with hollyhock and needles.
I wear my girlhood open, I wear it to the party, where peoplegoggle at my girlhood’s stunning corpulence and flawless grammar,
want to dance with my girlhood, want to glove and deglove mygirlhood then take the glove home to make love upon some altar.
new day, I feed my girlhood a sturdy breakfast of lessergirlhoods until it is cheerful again, which is to say quiet.
my girlhood would like a lavatory in which to gather with othergirlhoods and say nothing of real import.
my girlhood would like a new pair of breasts to go with thisnew pair of socks.
my girlhood is not flammable. my girlhood too busy for easyburial, too mouth for choke, is both the button and the clotharound the button.
is lascivious necklace, a danger only to me and my girlhood.
even in the mornings when I forget to put my girlhood on it is likemy girlhood puts me on, as flesh suit, as girl pelt, rat-a-tattingmy wood limbs down to promenade, just to see if it could.
my girlhood outlives everyone, even the priests who claim toknow in their priestly grooves that god predated girlhood. [End Page 71] and when I want to sleep, my spiteful girlhood will not sleep.will put its furs back on, will hold me nose-to-nose and talk dirty.say girl, let’s grow old together, here together in the luxuriationof your hair that wants so badly to be combed.
then hands still wet with girlhood, I’ll wipe our mouth. [End Page 72]
in no particular order, the fable:
□ a branch snaps underfoot and the forest, in its infinite cruelty, answers.
□ the girl guts her mother’s upholstery, climbs inside the brocatelle where she is already queen.
□ time does not stopper when the widowmaker snags the red pelt of the girl. only the woodlimb catches, and my breath, and the girl.
□the girl awakes, hurls up three artifacts of the dream—a stopwatch, a gat tooth, some other girl’s braid.
□the rule of three fits thricely into the open hand, like a knife or the suggestion of a knife.
□when you drink the embiggening potion, it is me inside the vial. it is me inside your hand like a suggestion.
□when you call for me, you forget the words to the invocation. (it is my name.)
□we are in a tavern or upon your mother’s grave when I tell you that the fable does not anchor to a time or to a city but to the body the menagerie of the body that lusty meal for bears.
□as in, the girl supinated upon her bed, covers undone, hair askew, curling like a cat to purge the mise en scène of a fable that is not her fable.
□and are we not still strangers, trading blood oaths with the same heft as marriage?
□ “once upon a time” is circumspect, cocksure. my worst virtues do more harm than my best vices. [End Page 73]
□and my worst harbors no time and does not happen oncely.
□wary of the neat rhyme and too precise to bother god, the girl knapsacks into a new city, king, or religion. free-bleeding a map between this and then.
□ in our shittiest sateen, we hobble down the hero’s journey, what is no longer a notion, not yet a road. [End Page 74]
INDRANI SENGUPTA is a poet from Kolkata, India, currently braving Illinois weather. A senior staff reader for Lantern Review, she received her MFA in poetry from Boise State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Quarterly West, Southeast Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.
In the Grimm Brothers’ “Thousandfurs,” when the princess flees her father’s lechery, we can read her as every woman—possessed of a “girl-hood” that follows her no matter where she runs, that is of use before she’s made...
