Raga

Scherezade Siobhan 

Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, writer, and performance poet. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in tNY.Press, Bluestem Magazine, Black & BLUE Writing, Cordite Poetry Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Electric Cereal, Queenmobs, Potluck, Fruita Pulp, DIAGRAM, Wasafiri, and others. Her first poetry collection Bone Tongue was published by Thought Catalog Books in 2015. She can be found @zaharaesque. 

every morning the temples wash their courtyards with the astringent of a cymbal-wail. holy sirens blatting for the release of kidnapped gods. these ears are conch-caves, buried bells for the missing. this is a homegrown hunch, a debatable heuristic, a placard for the happenstance. this is a hope that god even if blind, is not deaf. 

on the wall raised against my head - a portrait traced in madhubani. lord Krishna and his consorts playing beneath a monarchy of gods. beneath them, i - draped in jacquard- woven silk. my lap snugged in ancestral velvet. a cradle for the nest egg. horizontal as a grindstone i pestle my girlhood into. girl. sacred. earthbound. ore. jewel. root. grave. 

i have inherited a violent cough & an engagement ring. also Salgado’s sepia snapshots. the room is a diorama of brittle ice sinking sotto voce in a tall glass of lemonade sherbet. the streets are plastered with posters about summer’s en route circus making trapezes out of tree-branches, clotheslines, adolescent arms. 

i claim solidarity with crows. parade undressed in a somnabulist’s fugue. lay open a seduction as spurious as superficial wounds i dig into my teen- age knees. my wrists snap rubies. all my dreams bark naked, barbaric hav- ing lost their costumes in the auctioned theater of your civilized country. 

your winter-husked city is a church full of provocateurs. every prophet. every nihilist. i collect them all. wash ash off each forehead, set lamps in their ruins; tend to their ghosts as if they were my own orphans. 

the book asks that widows wear white and don’t eat at our table. so the piss-colored porridge is poured into old brass bowls outside the kitchen, next to the heap of sweetmeat wrappings and trampled marigolds. as the night slaps the banyans with a whip made of languor tails, i watch her slowly turn from woman to ghost – the torn, bleached flag of her saree swaying bleakly behind the leaves. nothing fulfills the shell of an afterward. the way light is lowered in a tiger-infested forest. torrid at first, then, spectral; cold and unheard. then, the swift spear of a loud scream cutting through the thicket’s chest. 

the way i entered his bed wearing nothing but anklets so he could relearn me by another sense. i came to him as sound before speech. a song that ascends from music to mourning. 

 

Issue 6.1