by Tishani Doshi

GIRLS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WOODS
………..for Monika

Girls are coming out of the woods,
wrapped in cloaks and hoods,
carrying iron bars and candles
and a multitude of scars, collected
on acres of premature grass and city
buses, in temples and bars. Girls
are coming out of the woods
with panties tied around their lips,
making such a noise, it’s impossible
to hear. Is the world speaking too?
Is it really asking, What does it mean
to give someone a proper resting? Girls are
coming out of the woods, lifting
their broken legs high, leaking secrets
from unfastened thighs, all the lies
whispered by strangers and swimming
coaches, and uncles, especially uncles,
who said spreading would be light
and easy, who put bullets in their chests
and fed their pretty faces to fire,
who sucked the mud clean
………….off their ribs, and decorated
their coffins with briar. Girls are coming
out of the woods, clearing the ground
to scatter their stories. Even those girls
found naked in ditches and wells,
those forgotten in neglected attics,
and buried in river beds like sediments
from a different century. They’ve crawled
their way out from behind curtains
of childhood, the silver-pink weight
of their bodies pushing against water,
against the sad, feathered tarnish
of remembrance. Girls are coming out
of the woods the way birds arrive
at morning windows—pecking
and humming, until all you can hear
is the smash of their minuscule hearts
against glass, the bright desperation
of sound—bashing, disappearing.
Girls are coming out of the woods.
They’re coming. They’re coming.

CONTRACT

Dear Reader,
I agree to turn my skin inside out,
to reinvent every lost word, to burnish,
to steal, to do what I must
in order to singe your lungs.

I will forgo happiness,
stab myself repeatedly,
and lower my head into countless ovens.

I will fade backwards into the future
and tell you what I see.
If it is bleak, I will lie
so that you may live
seized with wonder.
If it is miraculous, I will
send messages in your dreams,
and they will flicker
as a silvered cottage in the woods,
choked with vines of moonflower.

Don’t kill me, Reader.
This neck has been working for years
to harden itself against the axe.
This body, meagre as it is,
has lost so many limbs to wars, so many
eyes and hearts to romance. But love me,
and I will follow you everywhere—
to the dusty corners of childhood,
to every downfall and resurrection.
Till your skin becomes my skin.
Let us be twins, our blood
thumping after each other
like thunder and lightning.
And when you put your soft head
down to rest, dear Reader,
I promise to always be there,
humming in the dungeons
of your auditory canals—
an immortal mosquito,
hastening you towards fury,
towards incandescence.

THE WOMEN OF THE SHIN YANG PARK SAUNA, GWANGJU

Hello, I’m naked, the bubble above my head
says, translated into Korean for their benefit.
But they are busy with their breasts and cunts,
their dimpled, rounded, flat-dented buttocks,
busy washing disappointment from their houses
of sternum, busy with the dirt of summer lodged
around hillocks of elbow and whirlpools of navel.
In one room, a woman is pummelling another,
rubbing oil into her flanks and well-worn back.
In another, the young ones sit in a circle on stools.
Their breasts are Jell-O to gravity, they undulate
and lift, undulate and lift. There is gossiping,
of course, world over there is a posture
that involves gleam, that involves lean all the way
in for a proper bitching. Hello, I’m naked
and I’ve washed. The older women’s bodies
are segregated by hysterectomy scars.
They murmur in hot tubs with headwraps,
legs spread like avenues of thick black trees.
They are warriors—plundered or having plundered.
The threat of annihilation sits in cool dishes
of water beside them. Do you feel destroyed,
girl? One of them looks at me the way death
might look at life, with pity and all the sweetness
reserved for a person who cannot be shown
the way out. She lifts a dish of water
and pours it over her head, barely flinches
from the iciness. So this is how storms blow
through us. She beckons with one finger.
Come, she seems to be saying. You are me,
I am you, neither one of us immaculate.

THE LEATHER OF LOVE
………after John Berger

This morning I take the weathered
secateurs to stems of lantana as
a woman sometimes must. At the gate
a bee-eater suns himself and posts
a kiss to the breeze sidling on by.
Me in batik house-wrap from a departures
lounge. Bird in feathers. The strange and
marbled green of our kingdom. Embrace the
day, bird, I whisper. Just then white
clouds pass by, devastated as ghosts.
Bird and I look upwards. The sky’s the size of
a wrinkle—winnowing and closing, the
way an absence will. Birdie’s gone—
disappeared—who knows where, wrapped
in the morning’s foreboding. Dragonflies in
drag, a water pump muffled by tarpaulins,
the sand and salt and shrub—this is what we
live with. And when we lie in bed and talk
of the body’s failings, of the petulant dead, of
disenchantment and insufficient passion,
we’re chewing through fears so thick our
teeth are beginning to rust. Passion’s
how a poem’s meant to breathe—the
air sacs funnelling life into saline
lungs. Come back! I won’t be like that woman in
the rhyme who swallows a bird, which
isn’t to say you aren’t delectable. You, who hides
in the foliage. Yoo hoo! You, who are
the czar of colour. The morning’s hung
itself on a granite obelisk, waiting for you to
reappear. I pour light through my hands to make
brass, a bell, something to lure you from
your hiding place. I, who thought a
poem could be about a garden, a staple or hinge
on which another poem could be built. I, of
limited imagination. I offer you my skin,
which is the same as offering you the
universe that breathes wild, through leather,
that sews our stomachs to gunny bags of
love. Always and only is a poem about love.

EVERYONE LOVES A DEAD GIRL

They arrive at parties alone because they are dead
now and there is nothing to fear except for the sun,
except for the rustle of tablecloths, which instigates
a quickening in them, the reminder of a tip-tap
phantom heart. They are beautiful, so when they stand
beside lampshades or murals, rooms shrink, and the air,
previously content to swan around in muddy shorts,
grows disgruntled and heavy. They discuss methods
of dying because even though there can be no repetition
of that experience, something about the myth of the peaceful
bed annoys them. They would like to tell people how naïve
death wishes are. They feel an exhibition of Wounds You Never
Thought Imaginable might help contextualise things. A girl—
call her my own, call her my lovely, stands up and says,
I would like to talk about what it means to suffocate on pillow
feathers, to have your neck held like a cup of wine, all delicate
and beloved, before it is crushed. Another stands, and another,
and even though they have no names and some of them
have satin strips instead of faces, they all have stories
which go on and on—ocean-like, glamorous, until
it is morning and they go wherever it is dead girls go.
In the parties of the real world, people talk about how some
girls walk down the wrong roads and fall down rabbit holes.
People who haven’t put their faces in the soft stomach
of another’s for years, who no longer go out at night
to chase the moon. Even those people who do nothing
but make love in grass all day long. Benevolent people.
Their hearts leap when they hear a story of a dead girl,
and when they tell it to someone (how could they not?)
the telling is a kind of nourishing—all the dormant bits
inside them charge around like Bolshoi dancers re-entering
the world alive, and with wonder. Because how could you not
hold on to your wrists and listen to that that that
unquestionable bloom? How could you not fall apart
with relief ? And when they hold their own girls close,
maybe they tell them how beauty is a distance
they don’t need to travel. Maybe they make braids
of their daughters’ hair, and while doing this, imagine
they could be secured. Truly, they believe themselves when they say,
the world is a forest, darling, remember the bread crumbs,
remember to dig a tunnel home through the rain.

Tishani Doshi is an award-winning writer and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. Born in Madras, India, in 1975, she received an MA in writing from the Johns Hopkins University, and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001, where a chance encounter with the choreographer Chandralekha led her to an unexpected career in dance. In 2006, her book of poems, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection in the UK. She is also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for poetry and winner of the All-India Poetry Competition. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was published to critical acclaim in 2010 and has been translated into several languages. Her most recent book is a collection of poems, Girls are Coming out of the Woods (Copper Canyon Press). She lives on a beach in Tamil Nadu with her husband and three dogs. Visit her website for more information.