Burning
For Mamoni Raisom Goswami
When they lifted you up to the pyre, you were all red. Lips painted, eyebrows seething, skin
wrapped in the crimson of your mother’s mekhela sador. Your face crinkled from the years.
Decades and decades of devotion. Red on your cheeks. Your feet, red with alta dye. Footprints on
the damp earth. Tallness of Kohuwa Bon. Paleness in the air. When we finally made it to the end
of the line, my mother looked at your corpse and sighed. Nikhut, she said. Flawless. The men
behind us said you didn’t understand fear. That’s what made you undesirable. The reporters said
all you left behind was a casket of toenails. And incense – champa flowers & sandalwood. The
fire burns through the thickness of your hair. Rattling of teeth. Your book in my hands, a
goddess, a slaughtered bull. Blood, then nectar.
Witches are just women possessed by desire
In the first episode of the Netflix series, Beef, there is a scene
where Ali Wong masturbates with a gun. An unforgettable image.
Because some truths stab, I write a short story imagining my mother
slicing herself with a kitchen knife. In quest of being desired.
Because I cannot unthread violence from desire and because three
different men have entered me on three consecutive nights, I don’t
need a gun to finish. I am toyed, spent. My mother showers, her hair
smelling like daisies and honey. She takes me to the temple of the
nine planets, our heads draped in blue, the colour of Neptune. Not a
single strand touched by the wind. We pour milk on rocks. We
dream of different desires. She says the self is a myth. I was too
young to understand her then. A river dies inside of me. A dried-
down explosion of blue. When I wash myself after, a single strand
of hair cuts through the skin of my softest organ.
I don’t let out the screech. I become it.
Shlagha Borah (she/her) is from Assam, India. Her work appears/is forthcoming in Waxwing, Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, Salamander, Nashville Review, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and is an Editorial Assistant at The Offing. She’s a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her work has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, The Hambidge Center, The Peter Bullough Foundation, and VCCA, among others. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Her work is available at www.shlaghaborah.com.