Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 2. November 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094
Wooden Legs
Spinning Beneath Butterfly Flaps
We were growing bones being raised by
books, bread, bunker beds
or the Bible,
our dorm windows bare, wrapped by an
album of mountains.
On Tuesdays we remembered we were Children,
and hankered for happiness under
butterfly flaps, flashed the sun’s
eyes with our cheeks, sniffed the whiff of our fleeting childhood.
Our cotton-balls of black hair flipped
with our wooden legs
in the freedom of the air no-one
wanted to claim or name,
before burning our brittle skulls
between thighs of books yet again,
staring at a hairy future so distant it
knew stars’ great-aunts by their
middle-names. We were doll -dresses
parcel-packed into suitcases,
to be raised by nuns,
hymns, mountains and memories of our
Mothers’ Love.
We tumbled out later, pencil-firm: to a
whale of a world,
with nothing but the smell of books on folds
of our boleros —
blind to a brewery of men basking in the
madness of manliness.
Maybe if our hair had spun more between
heads of sunflower
and swords of grass that grew taller
than us, between buttocks
of mountains, I wouldn’t be this
table-sturdy old wagon dragging
seaweeds of its cracked pages towards
the cold wharf.