Meher Manda
every heartbreak is particular but common that much you know holding your
body close the way ma taught you the way you see women comfort themselves
in the movies alone after scenes of heavy pecking and gyration you learn
quickly you have figured out this is home even if this is no home India
they tell you is a mother is a country that prays to your image is beholden
to you you know this is not true you know how this home undresses
you with eyes in the years that have unspooled between your first breath and
your latest undertaking you have heard the horror stories of live women and once-
women all maimed in similar ways you have heard the voice of your ma
speak of those girls those girls who did something unimaginable or maybe said
something once and nothing is the same since those girls who loved someone
and walked away with insurgent love in their hearts or maybe they offered their
bodies with permission or maybe they said to an elder NO or
maybe those girls wore heartbreak on their sleeves sipped on loose
cigarettes with bitten, swollen lips and wore their scarred faces in full view
their arms glistening with empurpled bruises a shameless display of private violence
or maybe all they did was laugh it all off as if all of home was audience
to their laughter or was it crying maybe it was tears maybe it was
sobbing chest beating ground thumping and guttural wails that good girls
don’t make or maybe it was the impunity with which those girls walked and
talked and sat and stood and dressed and asked and challenged and berated and loved
and hated and dismissed and misrepresented and appropriated and festered maybe
it was all of it you know so you hold your body close lest it slip away
to become a dangerous thing you learn quickly like the time you are with your
ma and one of those girls walked toward you laughing or was it crying
or was it just breathing you’re not sure but you saw how she arrested the home
how all wandering eyes paused at her feet how everything even this planet
ceased to move for her and how lonely she looked carrying on and you
swear to ma you felt nothing but you know you heard your heart break only in that
particular way of glass crashing from great height or a body swept up by water
or a noose snapping the neck in two that unretractable end from which there is no
coming back
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Meher Manda is a poet, short story writer, culture critic, and educator from Mumbai, India, based in New York City. She earned her MFA from the College of New Rochelle where she was the founding editor-in-chief of The Canopy Review. She is the author of ‘Busted Models,’ a chapbook of poems from No, Dear Magazine and Small Anchor Press in 2019. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Catapult, Peach Magazine, Hobart Pulp, Epiphany Magazine, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.Speaks. Her poems have appeared in RHINO, The Pinch, DMQ Review, Salt Hill, and Quiddity. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
