The Small Cell


















His silver and gold are corroded.
His lungs beget a fungus .

I was a neglected sperm; this Small Cell, already a cell
which makes his alveoli become the galls in a dried leaf,
bronchus  knotted like Medusa’s  dreadlocks.
Unlike creating me, he has created an evil.
His blood carries it till the dead end,
like a  father carries his child,
like life carries death.

His breath, as sweet  as any father’s
to his daughter , now melts my face.
I breathe behalf of him – my nostrils are his.
I want to be his exhaled air and push this cell out
before it divides ceaselessly.  Does it recognize
my early  form  hidden in every one of his cell?
It is neither my twin nor my sibling.
We are not even.

He detached me from his flesh, even from the beginning,
as if he never wanted me, as if I weren’t  placid
enough to remain in his body.
Now that the creator
and the destroyer  exist as  one,
his creation won’t be the same,
and none will survive.

Like the metal is eaten by its own rust.
Like burls made out of  very bark.


2015 

© Subhadra Jayasundara

A Year without Her: Lotus Birth Nurtured upon a Utopian Figment

















I’ve been remaking Pietà the other way around:
mother was dead, 
the son who wanted to carry her in his arms – segregated,
their skins looked the same.

Having this every day dream started as a ritual.
Then became an ordeal.

Once there was no ache under her breast bone. To end the dormancy, mammary glands had been prepared for the last lassie stiffness.
And then love,
once transformed into stones and buried anonymously in ancient Gobekli  Tepe
where sky burial wasn’t deep enough, reincarnated within her.
Blood she lost in labour and blood she turned to breast milk
gave him a semblance of altruism 
on that day we met at first.

He fathered my sons. Their scars were made when the navel-string was snipped.
Days later, the stump fell off;
shrunken and black.
Scars are neither their center of gravity
nor the new skin filling it.

I shed my skin the day she left.
Closed pores on it
deny the breathing.   


2015 

© Subhadra Jayasundara

The Regret

















Before she died, I never knew her skin.

For him, my love thief, my womanliness
wasn’t innocent. His body melted within me
to be reborn through my vagina. My heart,
the black hole,
was quenched by the serenity of his eye.  
I enthralled the whole.

I had not remembered the cadence of her heart
and softness of her womb was his first touch, 
nor had I remembered the sultriness
of her life giving vagina was his second.

My womb shrank and shrank; became nothing.


2014 

© Subhadra Jayasundara