Indrani Sengupta
originary houses
when the children play house at the foot of the forest, the children are changed and the forest is changed. the forest heavied with majolica or the long-run lope of taxidermied deer, mirrors of many sizes which together form a single mirror. and the children : one violently weds the other. one wonders where she has left her waterglass again, in any one of her twenty-seven ballrooms. one has perfected honey till the word runs cold. oh to love the small-big house, the first first house, when the rosebush was your kitchen. when the house was just a gesture of turning your back upon a window.
the house where you are first molested is also a first house. the first house where you are a house. there is no violent marriage, no crawlspace and no interloper. more a threeway-tie between the house, the man, and you. in which you you you lose thricely. now you are contemplating windows, and why they are never where you put them. have you ever lived in a house of your design? you place the antlers of a deer over an imagined mantel, less warding than self-portraiture.
to be quite frank you don't remember a thing about your childhood but you know your childhood homes like the back of your childhood homes. they were blue and green and trembly and the pipes ran everywhere, like that one forest in utah which is just 47,000 clonar trees sharing a root system. you wonder where their ghosts go when they want to go away. in a new millennium you and your dear
buy a home your first home and it is like those same kitchens same corridors manifested same crinkled refuse of nosebleed beaming like poppies over the cistern. you lose a baby not-baby not-much-wanted- baby and it is not so much a loss as an attic door. you have been here before. there were windows. there were waterglasses here and there. and you. all your life you have been carrying the small forelimbs of your homes from home to home, in a ring around your neck. like a haunting.
triptych with fish and pears
1.
the best thing I ever did was pull a fishbone clean of its fish. in full view of a dinner party. it was an
accident. I wasn't ready to be a mother but suddenly everyone was clapping. suddenly my hair was
pinned up like my mother's mother willed it. suddenly I liked wine. I didn't have the heart to tell them
I've had three yeast infections in three months and I'm more pill than person now. in truth, no one
teaches you how to shuck or shear(?) a fish, but at a certain age your mermaid tail just splits. every I
torn ichthys.
2.
things my womb is smaller than: a finished infant. two upside-down pears. the full freight of human
language or any single cussword (you pick). a sliced-up pear that cannot be repuzzled. a bruised and
overswollen pear. my mother's mother's hair. any human name and the space it takes in any human
mouth. any human loved. the word “pear.” the venn diagram between how much I want this and how
much I do not want this. the way you look when you eat a pear. the way you and the pear look at one
another.
3.
but you've never liked fish, have you. I've tried everything. salmon, sous vide. hilsa like my mother's
mother willed it. fish meunière with slivered pears, like any good miller's wife would. I even tried
cooking once. one time, the doctor split me open like a fish, pit from peduncle, vent from ventricle. the
truth is I like the anxiety of a dinner party. the tolerable pinprick of it. the inadvertent sex of it. rake me
over the utter banality of it. how much right or wrong I can do barely changes. I can say let's take
dessert over to the foyer and they can say no. they can break my mother's china. they can sweep their
finger over the dust I keep forgetting. over the next four hours, we can all have daughters: name them,
plait them, put them to bed, put them to sleep.
Indrani Sengupta is a poet from Kolkata, India, currently braving Illinois weather. A senior staff reader for Lantern Review, she received her MFA in poetry from Boise State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, Southeast Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.