Author: Vyoma

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You went under.
The piece that did the remembering was anaesthetized.

Like, I can tell that those three standing together on the red line are a family
because they’re wearing the same brand of shoes. Converse.

I get tense wrong, a lot.
The more I am schooled in clean ends and beginnings,
The more viscously my mind rejects them.
I’m very aware that this doesn’t change the facts.
My feelings don’t count.
They don’t count.
Can’t be calculated; don’t tell a story; won’t fit a peer reviewed publication.

But I hope it comes back to you.
So that when you read me, you read you.
Because death anywhere is death everywhere.

For now, I boil oranges.
Simmer, really.
I can fill my lungs, fill this house with the fragrance.
Let it overpower the rose scented candle I bought and burned
because it’s Feb.

All things were poison. So we made the dose.
And I know it’s been a while
since the scream left your lips.
But it’s making its way back to you.
Will you let it find you?

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20.02.2025/VDS

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Come to me as orchids,
purple and blue.
Too good to be true.
As children who haven’t lost limbs yet.
And as adults who haven’t lost heart.

This may be the one time I disagree with Lorde.
These are the masters tools,
but it’s your hand that wields them.
Your sweat carving into the grooves.
Your fingerprints on those keyboards.
You can choose what you drink in the company KeepCup.

Do you remember when your goals began growing out of fear?
How did you learn to play hide and seek with power?
Who told you the world was yours to devour?

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21.12.2024/VDS

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Seven kisses & fairy lights
for children afraid of the dark,
who will never grow old enough
to run across the land,
chasing shadows & asking strangers
for a way back
to their inner child.

Seven kisses & fairy lights
for children who did not know
the difference between good & bad emotions.
Did not yet learn that feelings are stickier
than chewing gum under classroom furniture,
because school started the week after they were killed.

It sort of worked out.
Because it hasn’t turn out so well
for adults across the horizon.
Waking up mid-REM cycle.
No outfits of the day.
No couch to 5k.
To build up the strength to speak.
You’d have to be an Avenger or something.

Seven kisses & fairy lights
for children who did not run.
Mistaking the barrel of a gun
for a camera lens.
For children whose idiosyncrasies
will not be captured within
Gen Alpha clichés in the future.
That is, if we have one.

---

3.10.2024/VDS

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I don’t care what anyone says,
he is not ruthless.

He’s careless. Not ruthless.
Careless, as in “not giving sufficient attention or thought to avoiding harm or errors.”
This lack of attention
can be attributed to a busy work week, or an exceptionally stressful time.

He hopes—nay, expects—nay, assumes
That we will understand
These ‘rough patches’ he’s going through,
where he bought us these souvenirs of
destruction, disappointments and uncertainties.

Careless—as in, he could not care less.

How could we not understand a rough patch?
Living as we do with our wardrobes lined with that fabric?
I hear Skims® might be doing rough patches underskirts this fall.

Let me get this straight:
He’s humble about mansplaining,
Our ally,
Our champion of period poverty,
True connoisseur of ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?‘
He with his ‘it’s hard being a straight white man right now’.

His mind
eternally spotless off all humility
towards those who do what he does,
bleeding five days every month.

His heart clean
because he offered to
blow you first.
And “isn’t vaginal dryness a problem when you’re older?”
Talk about going through a rough patch.

His soul untouched
by the body count of illegal abortions. And that even under the best circumstances,
it can be a complicated thing to live with.
Safe abortion—Now that’s a rough patch that someone with an unwanted pregnancy would die for.
Oh wait, they are dying.

The male of our species coddled by a world made in His image.
Taught to occupy it as a cozy bubble.
And the spheres of that luxury, so smooth and shiny.
Because it has never encountered
the edges of fear,
the dents of consequence,
the pressures of anticipation.

We stare from the corner at your carelessness.
We envy it. We suffer it.
We die a little sooner, a little quicker, a little more painfully than we needed to.

All this because on that very first sunset, when Eve was fashioned from a broken rib,
He was nursing a broken heart.
Manhood—Your legal tender. In rainbow colours, once a year.
Your suffering is proving lethal.
Death and destruction swallowing the other half (we all know who we are).
We, who have power beaten out of us,
drawn out from our veins,
squeezed from our eyeballs.

Eventually, he becomes vulnerable to the force of his carelessness.
And we stare as he falls into the cushions of fragility.

Fragility: even his defensiveness is criticized with a luxuriant epithet.
Fragility: a quality previously reserved for Victorian beauties and porcelain dolls.

I don’t care what anyone says.
He is not ruthless.
His is alarmingly, seriously sick.

Nations burned to the ground,
because not even the highest offices can cure him of his mid-life crisis.
Health systems are not designed around his needs.
His suffering is at pandemic proportions.
And yet, the entire sum of all our knowledge
has not found a cure
for his pain.

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06.12.2024/VDS

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Sometimes I wonder,
when I go back to my field site in rural Uttar Pradesh
how the hell am I supposed to tell the women
their health rests in the hands
of the smartest and most cushioned people on the planet
who can’t agree on how best to ameliorate their suffering;
and how best to make them count
within the calculus that makes important people so happy.

But don’t worry. I don’t think about it a lot.
They are quite aware about how things work.
Why the village microfinance projects go belly up,
What to say when white donors visit,
When to fish out that old skill development certificate,
and where to serve refusal and disinterest.

They understand. Living as they do
at the mercy of God and low data plans,
Silenced, and at the mercy of the silencer,
who smiles at their babies
and writes things like “those voiceless women needed me to speak on their behalf.”
They might also sympathize with the researcher
at the mercy of peer-review processes,
article processing charges,
and the fact that the ideal job-market candidate “must have experience writing grant applications.”

Besides, they don’t want to waste time. People are dying.
There are crucial research questions at hand.
E.g., How do we agree upon the optimal duration that a person should suffer the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy? six weeks, twenty weeks, or the rest of their life.

The dying at the mercy of evidence-based policy;
The dying at the mercy of the experts and disciplinary boundaries;
The dying at the mercy of the willfully ignorant;
The dying at the mercy of the resolutely silent;
The dying at the mercy of the living;
The dying.
The dying.
The dying.

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21.12.2024/VDS