Undoing

By Nandini Dhar



I unwrap

my way out of what everyone
calls the purest.

Remove the whitest hues of the moon
to show the scars underneath.

I prefer to annul the fable
yoked to repeating mountains
to scratches on maps.

With the same two hands that dissect,

I break my mother in two

Smash her limbs
skeleton, ribs.

Extract her from calendar pages,
book-covers
archived booklets

Addicted I am to the sound
of her breaking bones,
I retrieve her by splitting
what

she  had never been allowed to become.


Nandini Dhar’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle,Melusine,Prime Number Magazine,Chanterelle's Notebook,Up the Staircase Quarterly, Medulla Review and SOFTBLOW. A Pushcart nominee, Nandini grew up in Kolkata, India, and received an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta and another M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Currently, she is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at University of Texas at Austin.

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