Five Poems

“Gardening at Night”

…occurs as result of the
interruption of rem, which
is remnant (of what little
language endures: mothers
sisters trees), and thus also
revenant (risen then roosting,
cocklike), and thus also
covenant (which I have signed
none of / nosebleeds onto
freshman copy of
Doctor Faustus does not
figure) or perhaps you are
foreign, and wish to say
R.E.M.: they who are
always losing religion,
perhaps because they’re
never plagued by angels
when they’re plagued

is engendered by the
rising of vapours from
the stomach to the brain:
usurped meat of motion,
like itinerant wombs, or
itinerant trees which
spurt from sleeping
throats and thighs

treat by bloodletting
bloodletting blood
is an allowance an
admission a cure but
the cause both sprung
from a single seed

Retelling of the sea

Three girl-gods in as many nations, each a displaced
consonant of lover’s stumbled name, diminutized in
stem. The she-who-invites a churned sea, she fathered
and consorted, she sad glut who eats of undersoil.
Not even your own ill-root, but every like woman’s.

Are you girl or are you grain? the etymologists cannot figure.

If you name him before he names you, bad conjugal
slip, all islands turn punishment, spoiled butter and
misconceived harvest, no good full yield. Turn heel and
tongue again, for the hundred provinces yolked in you,
not yours but still the flesh of you, less flesh still than synonym.
His babes and your leeches. Strength was made a girl-god
because men possessed her.

Ablution

night falls and all my pretexts turn
to piss, the too-keen palaver the pantomime
of refigured health. where I am going
no pill can follow                   you say
enough you leave to wash yourself, a ritual
for those who can safely drink of rituals. I
misread ghost for ghusl, tongue my name as
mnemonic, prostrate my hands to closet door
to a room that holds just me and the me that is
not of me. I bundle blankets like massive stacks
of sage I pray I count the whorls in closet doors
a numbered prophylactic, a remembrance
of things older still than any sick that could
vest in me, that when I go this, too, goes into
the ground with me, me the food and me the fetter

Malum maleficarum

The cleaved sixth of a fleshly whole, six
atria floodful of constellated pulses, white
decidua, the red shucks of a promised
winter. How it prognosticates the bite,
teeth long-clustered in the gouge, bone-
dimpled and legion, a many-mouth for mouths.

First the hue and then the hew.

Where apple is morpheme, any foreign fruit will dew.
Any oak with gall enough—to crush in sunder
Will prove in throat, in myth, in twice-plucked virgin belly.

When he cleaves you clean, shin
and bone, throat from cognate,
each bloodlet will be an island.

Bad Practice

All selves are quartered, flayed, severed into
fish, plated to be saved; sliced well beneath the
belly’s protrusion; can still wear bikinis
if they want to.

What even is a fallopian, where does that word
root from? What doctor named it for himself?
Why did he insert his lineage into
every woman’s abdomen? He doesn’t even
have a woman’s abdomen. I own no
lampposts; I wouldn’t wish to name another’s
lamppost after me.

All “it”s go unhad. All “it”s are had indelibly. All bodies
crater round the half-had “it”. All bodies are halved by it.
Are all bodies like this body, or is this how this thisbody craters
under a March shadow?

Are we made a grave for you?
Did you scorch the earth in us? Why nothing
grows in us, not language, not love that isn’t
well-rehearsed and reflexive. Not language
unborrowed from WebMD. Not even our own fears,
but every like woman’s, mimicked in our heaving.

I named you for your father, for your mother.
I didn’t name you, but named the space around you, how
my jaw widened to oblige you, how kingdoms fell to
feed you. How the body turned to millet and
collapsed into your jaw. How you spit me back up,
onto my own bare stomach.

So much toddling for an unthing, a null thing. A grape
too small to bear naming or be held.

_________

Indrani Sengupta is a poet from Kolkata, India, currently braving Illinois weather. Her work is interested in fairy tales, body horror, monsters, mental illness, and the loss of the self-spun “I.” Indrani has an MFA in poetry from Boise State University, and has had poems appear in The Feminist Wire and Fogged Clarity.