You can now read this piece in Bengali here, brought to you by our first-time translator Aadrit Banerjee.

the burning daughter of sun,

water turns acid when poured on your skin

in between your legs are fireflies pestering

you are skinny dipped in bottomless sea of sins

your mother is a raven of extraordinary womb

her splendour has multiplied in your desire

you are a flickering insinuation of miserable fate

as if the moths destined to hover above the fire.

In an attempt of stripping you naked, 

the fingers of your prosecutors will turn numb to crime

The blindfolded law will vanquish the buoyant weight of kingship

and their feeble pleading jeopardized in a stake for a dime

bartered like a cattle in extravagant court, 

silence has shamelessly opened its legs wide upon your lips

your questions marched naked in the assembly

why must their answers be wrapped in clothes above hips

your eyes can eat away five moons all at once

and the sky to your subversive appetite wouldn’t dare to laugh

if freedom and slavery were conjoined twins

i know you would blatantly cut and throw away your other half

foiled in a cascade of sheer white saree, you would have wished to pair it with spikey cowboy boots

a balded feminity braided like a paralyzed sacrilege

before they drag you by hair, you would yourself 

pull out their roots

You don’t know if the God is deaf or has his

headphones on

in his cumbersome playlist you too are just another song

God too has had enough in his boyhood to not turn heartless

What kind of music would he play to turn all deaf to the wrong. 

You aren’t afraid of being naked, in the 

mirror you have seen plenty of it

if mirror had eyes and looked back in yours 

the girl in you would clench tighter to bedsheets

as if both your bodies laterally inverted were knit

you wifed for five husbands and widowed yourself in gambling

marriage was the flower tucked behind your ears

flowers are divorced often from their beds

and marriages are bloomed with the most uncanny fears.

If you could give birth to a fierce, fiesty, ferocious 

daughter would she be your namesake

a mutilated girlhood is like marketting- 

a begging to be persuaded

your daughters in the court would recline in 

chairs and not on lease to be staked.

Ananya Aneja

Ananya means the rarest of all. She find refuge in the nub of poetry. She believes words can even bring a dead to life and daydream about fairytales, Turkish tea and Arabic poems all day long. She loves bringing revolution with her poems. She writes about women, men and their tectonic differences. Poetry is the echo of her voice.