~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Sreeja Naskar

you are given your grandmother’s name, but not her language.

      my mouth

(full of ghosts)

       I try to speak, but the vowels

 are missing /

                (or stolen) /

                     or buried with her hands.

                        (her hands—)

    rough as the fields she left behind,

   soft as the prayers she

(forgot to take with her.)

I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth

& taste dust.

(is that inheritance?)

       someone asks me

                    where I’m from.

I say my name /

      & wait for it to land—

          but it flutters / stumbles /

           (a bird with clipped wings.)

Sreeja Naskar is a poet from West Bengal, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, Modern Literature, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, and ONE ART, among other literary journals. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.