Self-Portrait as Blanka
Lavanya Arora
I used to crouch, run electricity through my body too,
so, no one could reach the purple parts
of my visibly green skin. Ask anyone who tried
to love me before I turned twenty-five.
I used to crouch, run electricity through my body too,
so, no one could reach the purple parts
of my visibly green skin. Ask anyone who tried
to love me before I turned twenty-five.
i say
i am waiting
for my uncles to finish paintballing
in the adventure park out back
they are just over there
my many uncles
their many guns
Your absence is a precinct.
I question it daily.
It offers no statements,
Only glass, fogged.
A radiator hums low socialism.
Do you alone recall folding through houses
like hands on a clock,
how your bones shrank into the space
between tatami and floor?
The wife wets her hands with daikon,
waits for the day you unlearn thank you.
Memory wouldn’t work anymore:
too much war, or school, or new names
Taking up space where our laughter
used to hide-and-seek each other.
And the lighthouse? It remains
beside the ruins of the old house
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