By: Sreeja Naskar

love’s womb was never mine

the first time love touched me,
i bit my tongue until it
bled.
(red on red. no one noticed.)

a piece of it in the gutter—
fat raindrops swallowing it whole.
slick with someone else’s goodbye.

another piece under my skin.
as if it wanted to be safe
and soft,
so it sank deep
where even i couldn’t reach.

once, i found a version of it in the sky—
pressed between clouds,
bright and unreachable
like the god my mother used to
whisper to
when she thought we were sleeping.

i saw love folded
inside a napkin once,
left on the edge of a table
where no one returned.

a boy said he’d keep it safe
inside a snow globe
(you know, the ones you shake
just to watch them suffer.)

i did not tell him
it had already cracked.
the flakes falling
were teeth.

(the glass holds nothing
but my reflection now.)

love’s womb—
i never found it.
maybe it’s a place
they don’t let you back into
once you’ve been born.

or it’s the warmth
i mistake for fever.
or the silence
i call peace.

i keep thinking
i’ll come across it again—
beneath my nail beds,
in the smell of singed hair,
in the mouth of the one
who left quietly.

but all i find
are notes written in someone else’s voice,
maps with no legend,
softness bruised into rot.

and still—
i press my hands to my chest,
swear i feel it beating.
something
like love.
something
like womb.
empty.
open.
echoing.

a ghost rehearsing its scream

i said i’m sorry
but my mouth tasted of
someone else’s
handwriting.

(they call it mourning,
but no one ever checks for bruises.)

i put on black,
even though it clashed
with my blood.

said all the right things
in the wrong voice.
clapped when the silence
begged me not to.

at the funeral,
my grief blinked
off-beat.
someone handed me a flower
and it wilted
and i knew it knew i was faking.

i don’t remember who died.
just the soup after.
the hands on my back,
too heavy to mean nothing.
the window that didn’t fog when i breathed.

someone cried
and i mirrored them.
not well.
just enough to pass.

i keep a bucket of words
under my bed.
most of them are
synonyms for almost.

once, a boy kissed me
like he was holding a match
to a room full of gas.

i lit up
only on the outside.

(inside:
stage set /
cue lights /
exit wound.)

i rehearse sadness
with my mouth full of color
that no longer translates.

someone asks how i’m doing.
i say “good,”
but it sounds like a question,
a throat clearing itself
of witnesses.

god hasn’t spoken in months.
but my ears still ring
from all that not-saying.

sometimes i think
we weren’t made to feel,
just to remember what it looked like.
like grief.
like joy.
like the in-between
that sings,
off-key,
behind the curtain.

###

Sreeja Naskar is a poet from West Bengal, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, ONE ART, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, Abstract Magazine, and elsewhere. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.