Rahana K. Ismail
I Can’t Keep Stones in My Mouth Any More
i.
for the fire they’ve caught on. Forestry of moss/
they’re raising. Paving floors/
of other mouths within mine. Grinding my teeth to stumps of axed trees, I can’t keep talking/
about wholeness without spilling/
flint-blades. Once cavemen gravid with tailing toddlers and plaguing spring-rains came looking for shelter and my mouth was a cave/
closed off by mudslides. My childhood girled around dragging toes and flagging/
tin men for a sliver of sun through these stones/
line-folding her palm into origami-beaks/ for stashed-in shards/ bangles make/
of children.
ii.
I can’t keep these stones in my mouth anymore. My burned crow-beak attempts to swallow their roughness like a find/
at the end of a day with many days of looking cabbaged into it. I tune myself to sense the grind, how I wane and weaken to break/
into tenuous identities until I forget how to grow/
thinner and slouch and splinter and split in two. I’ll go looking for coarseness then,/
a jagged wound to swallow from a day-coded pillbox. As long as I contain my fever/ in cul-de-sacs/
of swallowing. But I can’t contain anything in anything/
dying. I gulp down stones into helpless gizzards before I need the next one/
or the next one until I am a traffic of stones from my bird-beginnings/
to blinded ends.
iii.
Years ago I placed a moon of stones in a sun-filled pot and waved in villagers to throw in what they could spare with. Vegetative remains/
of their collected silence/ bit out mouths/
into stones, my certain contours— I long for wholeness now—/
my longing/ for lost minerals/ leech into taste-buds/ I crink /
to coldness/ of the soup-pot I can’t keep—
iv.
—stones in my mouth and more I filled my pockets with and walked once/
to my river. Surety of ‘I’m enough’. Surety that I won’t be duckweed. That I’m solid/
to sink. That I shrink to shrimp-heads. That I’m leached into stream-beds. That I drink depths and live/
in a case I’ve spun from my stones and my mouth-silk. That I eat decay, weave thriving. That I don’t crave caddisfly-like/
to crawl out, wing/ to someone’s sedge iris.
v.
My mother tells me I was born after my birthing/
of her. Since then, I’ve picked seven of my stones, hurled at pillars/
she pointed at. Yet the aim spring-wound through my arm arced the same way as my neighbor’s did,/
a man sometimes, a woman, her poised arm, a cracked fist in habit of throwing, as pillars on their end changed skins like garbs, howled/
in one howl. How by one stone by one stone you could draw/
blood-filled squalls and living. I’ve moulted to shepherd-skins since then—I keep to painless counting/ of homing/ feet, orphan goat-cry/ one stone by one stone—
vi.
—I can’t keep in my mouth stones of the night as they bricked into walls of the palace on the brim of the river, raw/
in hunger to swallow me whole. I didn’t know their caving teeth, their craving for my internment. I didn’t know I could unform/
until then.
vii.
Amber. Slate skimming. Green glass nothing but glass. I’m each,/
every stone in labor of forming. Every sand-sound that futures/
to geological definitions. The pilchard boat, I’m what sighs upon stillness. Incessant scamper of forming—a chip of tongues, lips of unsure rims, I’m unforming. Water— unapologetically copper. The sky (which I’m) dissipates/
|without direction—I’m unashamedly incomplete.
*nothing but glass from Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘Solid Objects’
Rahana K. Ismail* is a poet from Calicut, India. She is the author of
‘Newtness’ released by Yavanika Press in 2022. Her poems have been featured
or are forthcoming in the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English(2021, 2022),
The Penn Review, The Lighthouse, Usawa Literary Review, POSIT,
Alchemy Spoon, nether Quarterly, Contemporary Haibun Online, Bending
Genres, Aainanagar, Aleph Review, Setu Bilingual, Ink Sweat and Tears,
Chakkar, Alipore Post, Last Leaves, Io Literary Journal (Refractions),
Paradoxlit, Farmer-ish, Stone of Madness, Foxglove, Hakara, Qissa,
Verse of Silence, Pine Cone Review, among others.