Birds Of January and other poems by Kanupriya Rathore

Things have to happen, for me to
believe I am real

I need to be hit, or I need to see
my name on a hardcover

another winter gone
I swear I didn’t see a single bird

you ask me to hold the kite up higher
when it takes flight

you squint up at the sky
looking for something to cut

I am wearing my happiness as often as my tennis shoes
I almost hugged the nurse at the urologist’s

for carrying a cup of my piss
like it was nothing

I laugh when you say
you want a daughter with my eyes
but in my mind

I’m holding her already

You don’t want to have children
because you feel sorry for your mother
she said. I despise my mother. I lied.
I liked to lie for no reason
she liked to cut my crease with a black so heavy
it was hard to open my eyes
I placed glitter on her lips, careful to not
wet my finger
She gave me a book, an anthology
edited by a man who never loved her back
I’ll never read it. I told her as much
But I do. When I’m bored
when I miss being opened
and misunderstood

I met you in the rain. It wasn’t special,
just wet outside the restaurant.

I squeezed myself under your giant umbrella.
You must have despised me immediately,
how brazenly I asked for what I wanted.

Now I’m tangled in your blue comforter,
fish thrashing in the current.

I know I look good. My waist shrunk to the size
of your two hands, so small,
it’s as if I weren’t here at all.

Out on your terrace
I smash a puddle with my bare foot.

I imagine the ripples
washing across all my other lives,
better lives,
where I never met you.

In my grandmother’s basement

over a plastic jar full of makhanas
Shikanji, uno, and a fat joint
I tell her I’m in love again

she tugs at a strand of bleached hair
don’t let this one break you

*

It’s an old habit, she can’t keep her
hands from her hair

even when she taught me how to kiss
she tugged at her own braid

to show me how boys liked it
we were twelve, our bodies golden

swelling with the promise of more
but I had seen

the raw patch on her head
pink from uprooting

*

Back In my grandmother’s basement

I smack down the winning card
as if I’ve won, as if she’s real
and ask if she misses me

she swirls her soggy straw and says
it's easier being gone

*

when we were still twelve
she told me how much she loved

princess and the frog
The story of a true love’s kiss

back then I didn’t know what it meant to hurt yourself
but I must have known something

when she slept
I would hold her
I would take her hair in my mouth

I once saw a blackbird outside my window.
Her onyx eye blinked, sharp like a bell
and disappeared,
each feather tracing a different story in time.
I don't think she saw me
but I wonder what she saw,
for twenty-seven years.
If I didn't love her
I could have been her.
Every day, the sky opens
to my window of waiting.