wildscape. literary journal

Not There There, but Here
by Vidya Premkumar

                                                                                                                          I wanted oil paints.
                                                                                                                                Got chalk dust.
                                                                                                                            A beret swapped 
                                                                                                                   for attendance sheets.
                                                                                                                Term-paper confessions 
                                                                                                                      written in broken ink.
                                                                                                                    I alphabetised futures
                                                                                                                           that weren’t mine.
I wanted doctor-before-missus.
Got honeymoon rice in my bra instead.
Wrote my thesis
in the margins of grocery lists.
                                                                                                                          No kids, I swore—
                                                                                            then his fingers curled around mine
                                                                                                                           like a punctuation.
                                                                                                      I stayed. Became a semicolon.
                                                                                                                                 Not a full stop.
                                                                                                                                            Not yet.
Gave up on giving up—
(what a job does to bones
should be a museum exhibit).
But I stayed,
fossilised in fluorescent light.
                                                                                                        Home: flooded and ghosted.
                                                                                                 Rebuilt with terracotta and spite.
                                                                                                  Named the cracks after planets.
Love left,
returned as a drag,
told better jokes.
Now, refills the gaps.
                                                                                                                                          My body:
                                                                                                    rented out to grief and chemo.
                                                                                                                         Evicted the womb.
                                                                                    Locked the breasts in a memory drawer.
                                                                                                                               Ovaries? Gone.
                                                                                               Like the missed call from a future
                                                                                                        that didn’t leave a voicemail.
Forgiveness tastes like turmeric
stirred into old arguments.
My mother and I
share silence like secondhand sweaters.
Too warm. Still itchy.
But mine.
                                                                                                                                            I moved
                                                                                          to a place where rain forgets to stop
                                                                                                     and names grow in Malayalam.
                                                                                                                                   I came late—
                                                                                                                                                to joy,
                                                                                                                                          to colour,
                                                                                                         to thread-and-ink identities.
Now:
I’m a painting smudged on purpose.
I’m a book spine that refuses to crack.
I’m poem, protest, patchwork.
(also: potholder, poet, publisher of soft chaos)


                                                                                   And I
                                                                              have finally
                                                                                  arrived 
                                                                            mid-sentence.

about the author // Vidya Premkumar