Sreshtha Sen
Winter 2017 * A Nostalgist’s Map of America
After Agha Shahid Ali Here she learns, just means the air standing still. She can’t remember her way to the bar, the roads are parched sewers, the walls lie swollen with rain that refuses to visit. She requests another room; the authorities are not pleased, this is the second appeal since Tuesday, eighth one this year. Keys don’t grow on trees they say but that’s all they do she argues. Her favourite city was the woman before this. Before there was speech, there was desire, and before desire could be named, there were women and even before she began to call them home, she named herself geography. If you say you’re not in love enough times, does it spurt buildings of lies and then, if you make your bed but through some terrible mistake, lie in it one last time, you were only saying goodbye, can you curse your spit, pretend it doesn’t exist, this dry mouth needing her moist lips. It’s been a long drought she swallows. Her mouth becomes a mountain becomes a roar becomes a room of one’s own full of life and defiance, begins to speak—It is impossible to live here I cannot breathe. They still forget her name sometimes. Her skin shrivels up to her last hope and the keeper of the dead hotel cried “What is wrong now, we thought you wanted to be here. Officer, remove her from the premises, she doesn’t belong here; here is where everything can be still air” and she doesn’t dare to deliberate even until finally, she is outside, it’s hot again, her blood is not frozen and then, she exhales. * Stanza 6, Line 2: Taken from Shahid’s poem The Keeper of the Dead Hotel in A Nostalgist’s Map of America. |
Sreshtha Sen is a writer and poet from New Delhi, India. She studied Literatures in English from Delhi University and is currently completing her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College.
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