Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- The Lion
- Entomological Specimens
- Practising Your Skills
- Insomniac
- Taster
- What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage
- Bad Day in the Office
- You Are Not
- The Gold Bangles
- My Mother's Hair
- ‘Jesus Saves’
- Ticking
- On Ellington Road
- Cousin Migrant
- The Daughters
- Different Principles of Enclosure
- Day Ghost
- This Morning
- The Bird
- Almost September
- Phone Call on a Train Journey
- Small Hands
- In the Coroner's Office
- April
- 18th of November
- Notes Towards an Elegy
- The Urn
- The Rain That Began Elsewhere
- Gloves
- My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer
- Ghazal
- Ghazal
- Ode to a Pomegranate
- Bulbul
- Parvati Waits for the Return of Shiva, After the Slaying of Ganesh
- Lost Poem
- Large and Imprecise Baby
- Wireman
- Barbule
- The Found Thing
- Woman at Window
- Mr Beeharry's Marriage Bureau
- Mrs M Unravels
- Hummingbird
- Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter
- Acknowledgments
Ghazal
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- The Lion
- Entomological Specimens
- Practising Your Skills
- Insomniac
- Taster
- What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage
- Bad Day in the Office
- You Are Not
- The Gold Bangles
- My Mother's Hair
- ‘Jesus Saves’
- Ticking
- On Ellington Road
- Cousin Migrant
- The Daughters
- Different Principles of Enclosure
- Day Ghost
- This Morning
- The Bird
- Almost September
- Phone Call on a Train Journey
- Small Hands
- In the Coroner's Office
- April
- 18th of November
- Notes Towards an Elegy
- The Urn
- The Rain That Began Elsewhere
- Gloves
- My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer
- Ghazal
- Ghazal
- Ode to a Pomegranate
- Bulbul
- Parvati Waits for the Return of Shiva, After the Slaying of Ganesh
- Lost Poem
- Large and Imprecise Baby
- Wireman
- Barbule
- The Found Thing
- Woman at Window
- Mr Beeharry's Marriage Bureau
- Mrs M Unravels
- Hummingbird
- Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter
- Acknowledgments
Summary
Not even our eyes are our own …
– Frederico García Lorca, The House of Bernarda AlbaI want to tune in to the surface, beside the mayfly
listen to how she holds her decorum on the skin of the pond.
I want to sequester words, hold them in stress positions,
foreignate them, string them up to ripen on vines
and I want to commune with rain and for the rain
to be merciful, a million tiny pressures on my flesh.
I refuse to return as either rose or tulip but wish
to be planted under the desiring night sky.
I want to be concentrated to a line under the pleat of your palm
and for it to radiate opalesque under shadow.
I want God's fingers to break and for you to watch
as I fold my sleeve, reveal each detail of my paling wrist.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Small Hands , pp. 37Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015