Scatter-brained last night,
And astride a dragon, I hoped to never think of cleaning the room,
Only take note of the two crows fighting and each moment martyred to the next.
But the truth of October was only under a billion moments of work,
That I swept out, broom-armed, again and again.
Till late spring, when my grandmother said that she only ever swept in,
And rubble heaped there, all the way to the underbed depths.
That is what we slept on, the family—
Her truths.
I made note of each
Which is all I own now, added to my worth of work.
We exchanged brooms,
I saw for twenty years I had pasted reminders onto her forehead
Asked her to paste each back on mine.
She saw for seventy years she had eaten too much, and kept it in
Her feet tied to the foot of the bed so that, swollen, she did not float away,
Her stomach a spittoon for words that would have flooded the house.
On a thousand empty pages, she could have written her hands.
Each crack, and each unmindful salt grain in the watery fish broth,
Her mud walk to the school and to the marriage and the man.
My eyes squint through her palm-creases,
Astride her life, she could have had a word to call her own.
—
In sisterhood, I have learnt to eat the fruit that is going bad
And keep it in.
She has learnt to sweep in the opposite direction and leave it out.
At this rate, I told her, she could hope to make epics with her broom
And I could eat the world.
Cleaning the Room
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Apabrita Mitra Sarkar
Apabrita has completed her M.A in English Literature from Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India in 2023. She has been writing poetry for a few years and maintains a blog for the same. She works as a freelance writer, researcher, and translator, with her interest areas being gender and postcolonial studies. She currently resides in Kolkata with her family.