Seema asks me when I first learned I was a girl and I don’t know how to tell her

Poetry Contest First Runner-Up

i.

hunger in my mouth
sits like the ghost
of a milk tooth. i culled the
fearsome root of

and i am alarming when i get
like this, unbidden, self-
possessed
of the crushed saffron
syllables. there is an absurd
lurch to my ferocity not even
my body quite believes it

ii.

at nine years old, i was wise-
r than the fish
who slept in the pond my great-uncles lunged
at with great green nets, and the
dull-furred doe, who arched her neck
as we approached, open to
all hands. i was wiser than my midnight silk-

lined salwar kameez (why was the silk on the
inside?) and i was wiser than
the forced immensity of twenty-three year
old me. bravo, sister, for your
delayed flinch. your classic singing
impulses and how you sic the skin-
arbiters on them with only mouthed
apology. if you unwoman
yourself now, only your own fists
will think to miss it.

iii.

still
god. gods are something like i
imagined them.

they hunt with refracted teeth.

how you pull me out from under
the blue-glass table
then fix me like bark
against your kitchen counter.

how you separate the blood
from sacred deermeat. easy,
easy.

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Amrita Chakraborty (@sentientsea) is a Bangladeshi-American writer. Her work has been published by Winter Tangerine, Kajal Magazine, and The Shade Journal, and is forthcoming from BOAAT and Cosmonauts Avenue. She was a winner of the 2018 Golden Shovel Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2019-2020 Poetry Project Fellowship. Currently, she serves on the staff of Half Mystic Journal and The Brown Orient. You can read more of her work at medium.com/@amrita.chakraborty.