One more time

One more time

You ask me to tell you

Another one of those stories

That haunts my heart

That keeps me awake and alive

Sleepless and anxious:

            on fire.

Another one of those

            stories that         connects          the ones

I’ve birthed to those who

Have birthed me—

            Mind, body, soul—

Ancestors,

Alive    

and dead

            who live inside me

Unbound by time

            Unrelated by blood

Whose crossings

Enable me to grope in

            my hauntings—grow in

                        my tears

Stories that can’t be worded—

refuse terms available in

dictionaries                  permissible in footnotes and

glossaries

Stories that stab

Gently, tellingly

Then bleed into countless others:

            Wounds          Desires           

                        Destinies

Are received,

Given,   

Inflicted,          

            Curses

(dis)inherited

            For an

Eternity.

And you ask me

one more time

To tell you a story

A stabbing

            wordless story

Not to become

Restless

or permanently            wounded

by its truth

Nor to honor it by

Bringing it into communion with the

Haunted—

            Haunting—

powers of                   

            wordlessness

                      speechlessness

            but

to interpret it

to frame it

to make yet another Intervention or

Pronouncement

To fix its meaning

In a voice that takes its accents away

In a tongue

That has been stripped of

flesh                muscle                        sensation

                                    vibration

in a voice that fixes its meaning

            and delivers it

cold

singular

Soulless

incapable of twisting

exploring, moving, collaborating, with

Lips that can't come together

to echo

the sounds that are unreachable,

                        unreadable

            unhearable

This tongue—

These Vibrations take the story

down the throat into the gut all the way to the

Pit

of the stomach

But Tongues,

lips,

throats,

guts

            stripped

                                    of

                        muscles                       sensations

                                                vibrations

will beat

the story flat

Like a drenched old rag

Being beaten repeatedly with a flat stick

hand washed

on stone by a

body squatting next to it

Bent over it      beating

            beating

                                    beating

Surrounded by a mountain

           bedsheets, bras, salwaars, shirts, skirts, and 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

over years,

decades,

generations

Yet you feel authorized

to insist that I tell

you another story—

as if my tongue was not my own hot

            flesh

you retell

Without humility or

            Tentativeness without

Feeling in a piece of your bones

Even 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

My arms, shoulders

up my neck

that connects with the veins

of my Soul.

      That 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

            beating

cloth after cloth

On the stone

Before that trickle vanishes.

(10 November 2016)

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[1] I dedicate this poem to Baba, Ma, Chandar ki Amma, Sarla, Rajkumari, and Tarun. Thank you, Medha, for helping me translate at points where my metaphors could not move.