By Adrija Chatterjee
If I am allowed to, in the next life
May you be reminded of places
You spent the eighteen summers of this life.
This time no longer in silent pretension of concentrating hard on dogmatic words
all the while.
Pressing hard the fold of your ears
To trace past the clanking and intentional chaos
Of my plates.
Running into sobs and shrieks
More noiseless and muffled
Than your jittery fingertips.
Skeptical of tapping upon the telephone keypad, the man of the house forbade you
to ever use.
Bite your lips, they’d say, till it bled
Frightened awe and diabolic innocence
Perforated your insides.
As you watched me spill that over and over
In nervous hope and cretinous rationality.
Knowing better how there was another chance.
To fly away
Into some other room
Upon territories and strategies
Of outsmarting the girlfriends in the next round of hopscotch.
Did you harness ingenuity?
Of forgotten chutzpah cremated in blind lanes?
Or resurrect the doctored woman in the other room?
May you be reminded of the stories of your grandmother’s lone walk
Down the riot-stricken streets, naked breast, weaning the infant me.
The ones you doused in adept forgetfulness
And for once
Try and not to italicize those
That the man of the house traced glory in.
Promises of your redemption night upon night
This time not to be hummed down to a deafened pitch.
A scalpel is what you find the moment heavy soles of untied shoe laces crawl in.
And pretend cleaning those cuticles till you bleed.