I am a woman,
I guard my orifices most assiduously. My flesh and
fluids were contoured into feminine being when a
phantom trespasser drew the thresholds of my body
with his footprints. He is always already waiting there
to
violate those sacralized and sacrilegious
interiors
brought into being by that threshold of
footprints. If
these footprints were to fall illicitly out of
line, erasing that separation between inside and
outside, a licit mapping of the world would be
defaced
and denied.
I am a woman,
I reflect mirrors that shape the contours of
desire.
Mirrors within mirrors, webbing reflections in
patterns of possession and belonging. They map the
borders of my touchable, seeable, smellable skin.
They
cast me into the inscriptions of kinship and
family.
They etch the edges of ornaments and the folds of
garments that mould the shapes of my skinned,
limbed,
flesh. I reflect their collage of skin and cloth
and
metal and glass and vermillion and turmeric and sandal
paste, melding, meshing, dissolving into each
other to
flesh out my corporeality.
I am a woman,
I have learnt to curve my arms at that precise
angle,
at that precise distance from the breast, to hold
the
feeding child. Space walls into interiors to
sculpt
the possibilities of my bodies being. Gaze grids
space
to choreograph the combing of my hair, the opening
of a door, the walking across a room. Mnemonic grids
against which legs spread too far apart or lips
curved
in an indiscriminate smile bruise themselves into
remembering the postures of the feminine.
I am a woman,
my body plots time as a narrative of menstruation,
gestation and disintegration. I am the narrative
of
the fecund and the dying body. And there are other
innumerable quotidian stories unravelling
themselves in
the intervals between the lighting of the gas and
the
reading of a book, the bathing of a child and the
spreading of a mat.
BUT I am a woman,
when my skin stretches into a taut sieve, when my
body
fissures into nameless crevices and amnesiac
thresholds lose their memory of inside and
outside.
When under the shadows of my eyelids I lick away
Words
and re-script stories. When I turn mirrors around
and
scratch away the mercury in patterns that
reconfigure
the contours of desire and the body. When I
permeate
into the interstices of desire, into the voice of
speaking mouths and the fingers of writing hands
and
the ink of written words. When the first person
pronoun becomes opaque to the narrative of the I
and
names that cannot interpellate start
proliferating.
When my body mutates insidiously and corpographies
Are
always in the making. When my flesh turns pensive
and
my womb begins to orate. When smell tastes the
shape
of contoured space and evades its surveillance.
When I
trace out in darker ink, fragments of half faded
lines
and connect them to other fragmented lines to
write
new closures to the narratives written by my
mothers
on the palimpsest of fading stories.
Contributor:
PARINEETHA SHETTY. An upcoming poet, writes highly sensitive and suggestive poetry. Has many published poems to her credit.
