wantless, wanting

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                (the absence of absence — 
               isn’t that what you wanted?) 

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a woman peels an orange with her teeth.
juice drips down her wrist.
the pulp slick as a throat.
she says it tastes like someone else’s hunger.
(she swallows anyway.)

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       a child folds their hands in prayer, 
      then forgets what for.  

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the gods are just dust in a corner now —
so small you could swallow them whole.

                            (and you do.) 

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   a man cups a bird's body, 
      small and boneless. 
  the wings flutter out a prayer.  
            (to name a thing is to betray it)              

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                           & across the street, 
                          a couple folds themselves into a window— 
                     mouth to mouth, skin all splinter.  
           love minus love: the mouth stays empty.   

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    a friend tells me about the dog she couldn't bury.  
it kept looking back. 
               (even the dead are afraid of loneliness) 

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the hours are tender as meat.

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       what’s a name but a secondhand hunger?  
               what’s a kiss but a room on fire?  

                     

                    (what’s a body but a place to forget in?)  

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  the ocean forgets itself & calls it a tide. 
     the trees forget themselves & call it rot. 
a man plants a fig tree where his mother’s shadow fell.
the roots bloom like cracked ribs.

   

    your hands press against a face you cannot name.  
       you say I love you like a dog licking its wounds.  
     your blood tastes like knowing. 

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              (the body still bleeds. the body still wants.)   

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        Love.  
        Minus Love. 

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     and isn’t that what you wanted? 

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                      (the mouth still bleeding, 
                       the teeth still clean.)

 

 

 

we name the dead after trees

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my father planted a fig tree where his mother’s shadow fell.
(the soil still wet with her name.)

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      my sister threw the sapling away.  
          (she said it was rotten before it even touched the soil.) 

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the neighbors watched without watching.
my father’s hands were still dirty.
(he said nothing. he never does.)
someone said we had too much bad blood for roots.

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    the tree didn’t belong to the ground yet.  
                (the ground didn’t want it.) 

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that night, my sister burned the empty spot with a cigarette.
the ember sputtered & died.
(she called it a kindness.)

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the next morning, the sun cracked over the yard.
The ground was bare, except for the hole.
My brother stepped over it on his way to school.
I walked around it.
My sister spat into it.

       My father didn’t look.
              But I swear, the dirt twitched.

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someone said grace.
no one listened.
(the air swallowed it whole.)

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the fig tree was still gone.
the ground was still there.

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                (what’s the difference?)

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                later, my father poured water where the roots might have been. 
                my sister watched from the doorway.  
                    (she didn’t say sorry. he didn’t ask.) 

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                the water sank into the dirt.  
                      (it went nowhere.) 

 

this is how we keep our promises: 
    we plant shadows & pull them out.  
        we water the earth like it owes us.  

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     this is how we name our dead: 
      we give them trees & call it honor.  
       we tear the trees from the ground & call it love. 

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         (my father still believes the roots are growing.)        
        (my sister still believes in fire.) 

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And still, the roots stayed.

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   I watch the ground split open. 
              (I call it inheritance.)

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Sreeja Naskar is a poet from West Bengal, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, Modern Literature, The Scarred Tree, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, among other literary journals. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.

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