By Sreshtha Sen
Bestiary
I slew my first goat at the age of sixteen & couldn’t stop
nursing her children. I had never known a shepherd
like me: how I foraged how I fed how I came close
to giving up because they refused my skin. All night
long the youngest one cried for his murdered
mother & all night long I pled for it to just fucking suckle
these teats I held for him. Do you understand? I did
love him I loved them all but still grew tired of pretending
I could be someone they’d grow to want. Care makes
me a different beast each time. I never did learn
to bow to anyone & I can’t shed this horn or be
shorn but ride me & I’ll lean. For you, I’ll buck.
I get it. You want to know what happened to the kids.
I just wanted to name the things I’d do if I could.
Do You Know How to Dispose of a Body?
It is a lie that I enjoy death. I have nothing
to gain from absence. All around me, life
unfurls & I allow it: on a train to Berlin
I watched cows grazing on newborn fields
& you know what, I get it. I am as pleased
by this as any task accomplished. I like to be
cleaned after I come. I forget his face but he (too)
was good at what he did—his lapping. His swallow.
I miss his tongue but did what had to be done.
See. It doesn’t have to be sorrow or ecstasy.
I only feel nothing for my kill. I’ll dress for
the funerals (even yours when the time comes)
but do not mistake precision for sentimentality—
I am merely here to ensure a job well done.
First, There Was a House We Built.
Time is only linear if you say so. Instead,
you said stay and all days become this
one. We live like the tree that dropped
in our backyard one morning—turned into all
the wood we could hold. You felled, I carried.
My muscles, so used to this music I forgot
to ache. We dug pits prepared for fire and hid. In secret,
I stored bark between our legs: fury in search of fuse.
You said this way, we can be forever.
Meaning winter never arrived. Meaning when
the light hits slant and right someday,
I’ll be ready to burn this shit to the ground.
Summer with or without
After Chen Chen
with mangoes pickled in our throats in chili and lime.
without a house unlocked till dusk dawned & Ma returned from the university
without softball, like the game I watched on TV once, and I couldn’t quite understand the rules but the right fielder (or the left) was quite attractive
with cricket which I could never quite understand either, but when I watched softball, I kept making comparisons between the two. Is a foul ball the same as a wide ball?
without strike one or strike two or strike three. with LBW with howzzat? With out
with a makeshift pitch wicketed in tar. with a ball so old, it could be me—the smell of sweat stitched into seams of leather. with the neighborhood boys who gave me permission to be: no girls are allowed here but you can play if you want because with my brother who was the eldest they had ever known and besides, he was the only one to possess a bat—he’d won it in a tournament fair and square and some famous captain had even autographed it—so if his sister wanted to bowl, she could be a boy in the evenings. with another boy who claimed his parents named him Prince because he was monarch of all he surveyed. with Prince who surveyed me and the bat into a corner once when no one was looking, his eyes red with lust and heat; who said kneel and I bent, who said give and I gave as he batted my back with his stolen scepter. With fucking lesbo & kutti &ladki ho ki ladka & royal words slid under shin & chin & bone
without a decent lie for where the bat disappeared. with my brother pulling my hair against his rage and he kept pulling it for years till he could afford a new bat, till he grew too old to play cricket altogether.
with analogies I, as usual, carry too far.
without a prince for all those years.
without a prince for a long, long time because I never wanted to feel like that again—knelt knees bleeding into concrete. Until you. & then learning to live again
without you.
Sreshtha Sen is a poet from Delhi, India and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review, an online journal for & by south asian poets. She studied Literatures in English from Delhi University and completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work can be found in Arkansas International, bitch media, BOAAT, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, The Margins and elsewhere. She was the 2017-18 Readings/Workshops Fellow at Poets & Writers and currently lives and teaches in Las Vegas where she’s completing her PhD in poetry.