I REWIND THE SECOND MY MOTHER’S GIRLHOOD BREAKS
I am below her when it happens:
She let’s go of the banyan’s hanging roots,
her body launched into bulbul’s arc
on the upswing, so many ixora blooms
clouding through her cheeks
My mouth wants itself a perpetual hole
for laughter to cocoon
Please, let her rise, let her nest
into joy
Let her believe her bones remain bird-hollow
in this wind that smells of rosemilk
Let her hear the grinding of cardamom,
a sparrowed lullaby humming the weeds
But here unravels the slow fall;
her shoulder in fragments which quill
straight for the thrumming of her chest
I refuse her inheritance,
resent my eagled clavicle, the rasp
in its turn
I want selfishly for grace,
bitter even when she takes care
to play me her cleanest whistling:
How she crawls through her father’s carpets,
whispers udaan twelve times, rubs
the small of her back into intimate feathers
How she tucks old quills
into the chadar of my forehead,
a fresh hatchling throwing its first chirp
into her filling mouth
She is sorrowed when she brushes my hair,
I tried, but you love me so different
in your dreams
And I am treacherous to forget
what unravels in the afterbreak
my mama thrown against the sky,
cresting in her stubborn laughter
Keep her there
Prerana Kumar (she/they) is a writer based in London. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and recently won Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poet’s Prize 2022. She was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize 2022 and has been published in The Telegraph, Magma, The White Review, Fruit, and bath magg among others. Her debut pamphlet is forthcoming with Guillemot Press in 2023.
IS&T internships run for 4 months each consecutively, and in order to go some way towards redressing the balance in publishing, will for the foreseeable future come from the Black, Asian, Latinx and other ethnic minority communities; we will almost certainly expand our searches to include other disadvantaged groups as our programme develops. More details are below.
Details on how to submit to Prerana can be found here.