Girlhood

I grow fangs for teeth

and then bite on my own tongue

until I draw blood.

I wear sacrifice for clothes

and line my eyes in compromise.

I cut off my tongue at the end of every conversation.

It grows back like a lizard’s tail.

Each time.

I was born with knees made to be bruised

begging, apologizing, satisfying.

They gave me a mouth to open

but not to speak.

They gave me a body not to love

but to appease.

They grew my hair long

just so it could be pulled.

I am just a girl.

I have graveyards for lungs.

Graveyards of breaths I drew in.

Graveyards of breaths knocked out of me.

They keep saying it’s for my own good.

“You are just a girl”

“Do what you are supposed to do.”

This is not a home.

This is a haunting.

Welcome to girlhood,

Let me show you around.

My days are born of sadness.

Every morning when she visits,

I offer her a cup of tea—

and then she leaves.

I have been Virginia Woolf’s suicide note—abundantly.

Sometimes out loud,

and on other days, quietly.

Sadness brings a certain coldness—

a strikingly painful coldness

that crawls to your stomach.

My feet are always cold.

Madness comes in episodes.

My plate is always empty of sanity.

It comes in parts

somewhere between silence and sadness.

Madness is embracing me,

enveloping me like Ammi jaan’s arms,

where I no longer recognize

the grave of grandmother

under an old sycamore tree in my bed.

I am just a girl.

There is dirt underneath my fingernails.

Put it under a microscope

and you’ll find dreams in there—

wiggling around, growing.

They will kill them if they get to know.

Infestation, they call it.

You’ll find blood in there too—

staining, tainting, taunting.

My hands are still wet and dirty

from the blood of dreams

I’ve had to kill in me.

I am just a girl.

If a scientist were to study me under a microscope,

my love would be coined the cancer of all emotions.

I am always too much.

I am never enough.

I am just a girl.

And girlhood?

It’s not pink ribbons and daisy chains.

It’s not lullabies and sugar-spun fantasies.

It’s a broken heart’s gallery of silenced dreams.

A museum of mourning.

And you—

You are standing

in the middle of its main exhibit:

the aftermath of a war a girl is born into.