These poems are from my project The Vanishing — a poetry manuscript and art installation that addresses the Indian issue of female feticide, forced elimination of girls before birth based on their sex alone.  More about the project, published and installed work is at www.genderedarrangements.com. Kim Cunio collected found sounds to compose audio for the poems in The Vanishing.

Bhaiya, Bhaiya

Like a discarded marigold
Plucked immaturely
I float on Lake Fatehsagar
In Udaipur, Rajasthan

From the sky I see
My sisters hopscotching
Saying “Bhaiya Bhaiya”
Maybe by calling them boys
Would transform their sibling
Who’d join them in eight months
An actual brother

Names

Pick Indian names for your girls, names pregnant with meaning

Aditi, mother of Gods
Bhumi, earth goddess
Chhaya, goddess of shadow
Durga, goddess of power

A Mother’s Confession to her Daughter

Your grandmother’s caramel lips smooth in smile
when I miss my period on a full moon day
When I crave sweet jaggery she slips gold bangles
up my wrists, shaved, slick

And what is there to hide from you

Even your father paints his vision of you when
his tongue licks my tamarind nipples once pink

Hopes smash
lips pucker
wrists bare
teeth on skin stain red
when grainy You pixelate inside
a black crushed cone
the tip sliced off

* * *

Manisha Sharma’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol, TAB, The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, The Saturday Poetry Series, New Asian Writing, and The Bombay Review. She obtained an MFA from Virginia Tech, and she was an AWP poetry mentee for Spring 2016. She was selected to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Presently she lives in Boston and is a writing coach at NuVu Innovation studio in Cambridge.