She Chooses to Prefer

Unraveling wool from an old sweater, a little emerald-green doll-sized sweater,

she prattles about her long lost husband, never once spitting his name;

his name is a toad and her heart, a pond. She picks on her hair as her

dexterous middle finger finds her head. This undoing yarns is not a hobby

but the compulsion of securing consolation.

Thoughts have forever wormed in her head and she could never unperson

their harbinger. So she tells me to be a no-nonsense babe, hinting how I might

get pregnant but never really telling me how.

I so want to get pregnant. I look at my legs and then at hers. She talks of a woman

who'd been given a man to love. I hear 'wife' like the sound of ten full-stops thrown at me.

She's been schooling her words in a nunnery. I hear her anyway, for I have no words

in my womb.

I think of Vienna. And of Benares. I plunge into question-marks that like waves mislead me.

I'm almost her in my reverie. But there are no words in my womb.

She's still there, unsnarling the green thing and working it into mishmash, a cobweb

of words about her husband. Her hair on the floor is as dead as this husband.

I feel my nails and my teeth and a gut- all in place, I tell myself. The husband, when he's

back, knocks not at the door but at the table laden with air. His lips wreathe a curse.

I know she will choose not to unlace these snakes that are his words. He, in fact, is a fang.

And she's balding. Nevertheless, that middle finger will find her head. She prefers it to the curse.