One more time

you ask me to tell you

another one of those stories

piercing eyes on fire

chase the dark

turmeric saris bleed

large callused hands

pound against eardrums

umbilical cords entwine

bamboo pens

stab guts unverified

ancestors

out of time

turn away words

poison dictionaries footnotes glossaries

without permission

a million needles sigh

wounds desires destinies

received out of line

snatched blessings

girls don’t inherit

and you ask me one more time

to tell you a story oozing secrets—

sun soaked green mangoes in heeng kalaunji

young feet salted in ocean’s chest don’t return to shore

bonded server parent unbound

—not so you may heave a sob hounded

nor honor it by

communing with the

haunted haunting—

collisions

but to frame

another Intervention

pronounce meaning

accentless

strip flesh muscle sensation

plastic petals

incapable of twisting

exploring, moving, collaborating

lips don’t come together

to echo

sounds rebound unregistered.

but Tongues,

lips,

throats,

guts

stripped of sensations

will beat stories flat

like a drenched old rag

beaten repeatedly with a heavy washing bat

on stone by a

body squatting

bent over it beating

breathing

beating

surrounded by a mountain

bedsheets, bras, salwaars, shirts, skirts, saris,

rags, pants, petticoats, underwear, and heavy blue jeans

blood-stained and

waiting to be washed before the

trickle in the tap disappears, before the

legs become overwhelmed by that full

heavy feeling making it

impossible to stand

on your feet after you are

done

washing that mountain.

If my metaphors do not

make sense it’s

because

your body does not know

what I know

from learning what it is like

to beat clothes

on stones under trickles of water for

years decades

generations

yet you demand another story

as if my tongue was not my own hot

flesh

you retell

without shiver or stammer without

feeling in a piece of your bones

for a second my

wounded everyday sort of

joy, pain, of

that overwhelming fullness

that piercing, deadening Heaviness

in my thighs

moving upwards and spreading in to

arms shoulders

up my neck

connects with veins

of my Soul.

you will never

realize, you cannot

know:

in your eagerness to retell another

one of these

stories you’ve gone

without learning

how to squat

for hours

washing

breathing

beating

cloth after cloth

on the stone

before that trickle vanishes.