Creation Myth //
Amma fashioned me out of Chennai
sun, she bent boyhood in temple light
unwound from her shoulders. I fall
in concentric circles, in the gap between
the floor and her lips. I float to cradle her
burning prayers, let them sear my skin,
flag body: I bleed her dream.
//
Her gods burn my skin brown, dipped
in white-hot sin. I am christened,
boy in the wick of a diya, waxy
and pooled at my wrists. My lips
slicked with Gayatri with Her
under my tongue, undone my
divine mother, her light, may it
illuminate all our realms of being.
//
Magenta, artificial blue, strobe,
the boys in their fathers' inherited ties.
In the light
I wear the kurta Ammamma bought
for me when Amma dissolved her
tongue in the sea. The embroidery
is frayed, her body is frayed, the Gita
she brought from India, its scriptures
were frayed, gouged-out. At school they
swing
a prayer at me in two-syllable, two-syllable:
faggot. fairy. I hold it in my hands like
a little sister, her body ages, sunken into
memory. She inherits her mother's tongue,
replaces it with English. I drink her words
until they aren't bitter anymore.
//
Amma's dreams, they
were frail, cremated long
before my mouth was English-buckled.
Her son, bathed in her cupped hands,
the Ganges in her palms. Wrung forgiveness
out of a boy, praying to a prayer body.
//
I kiss him and my mother's God clutches
my brown skin.
More in love than I was in sin.
His neck, the altar to America,
I sip a language I learned from
my mother.
God's wrists were slit in the moonlight
unspooled out his car window.
& I've never felt more holy. My body
trickles to the temple floor.
By Rishi Janakiraman
Biography:
Rishi Janakiraman (he/him) is an Indian-American high school student who writes from North Carolina. His work appears or is forthcoming in YWP, Chrysalis, and Eunoia Review. A Top 15 Foyle Young Poet of the Year, he'll be attending the Arvon creative writing residential in February 2024. In his free time, he reads for Polyphony Lit and enjoys palak paneer.
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