undone

by Amy Wang, Westview High School '23

December 30, 2020

"Bride of India" by Pragati Dubey, Mata Gujri College '22

The sky is pregnant with rain and in this daylight all we can see is our hands, bones puckered into crescent divots against the back of our palms. Wreathe your ladies in white and grey sorrow, in the feeling of coming out of a dark theatre with your head reeling only to realize that the sky is still light and

everyone around you has been untouched by what you have been scooped empty by. There is a tragedy in being the one left unscathed, there is silence is acquiescence and a wonder in letting go, but you have never learned the last two and when the water says it loves your smile you jump right

in this house there is violence, the gentle kind, the kind that says it loves you and then reaches down into your chest to check the temperature of your heart. There is quiet in you, with your wrists half- buried in willow leaves and loose wings. The girl on the ridge of your spine sits straight and walks into the river

with pockets full of stone, you sit on the bridge and watch a woman drown, watch her grow fins, crescent gills snaking straight out of the vents in her lungs like she was made to swallow silver. She is a reverse-Ariel, skin melting into fish scales instead of vice-versa, but in both fairy tales they took her voice and crushed it into an empty box that would sing whenever you wound it up. In twenty years the two of you will meet on a corner avenue and you will pretend that you have never met before and she will never

remember, you define what you are but you cannot define what you are not, and the only puppet strings that don’t clatter dry are ones you have cut yourself. There are so many ways to kill but only one is courageous, but you shut that door twenty years ago and the second you did there were shadows in the

hallway light heavy like a blade against her throat, you look in the mirror and a girl who cannot breathe in open air looks back. There is a quiet in her, that girl with your hands halfway down the drain, that girl who unknots your veins when you ask her to. The only difference between the two of you is that she is strong and you are weak, and in the end that is what will kill you both. How quiet you are, your voice finally boxed. How holy she looks, with a lung full of silt.