Sanjana Nair
Some of My Best Friends are Human, or Anger
I.
That girlhood stories of happy girls,
even royal born, always ended with princes.
I hear a rendition of the masculine
joining the feminine, to finally make a whole person—
but I think of Daphne.
How I’ve turned tree to escape the unwanted man,
and I tell you: It doesn’t work.
The wrong man, the one that requires escape,
sees a tree as a place to piss.
II.
Grateful it’s rocked me for the while
before I crumble into a heap
of bones, unmade dreams, melancholy
dead memories. I’ve been called dirty names
in the places of my grief,
but anger doesn’t do that.
She turns me into fire
and no rain of any kind can put me out.
Even without being wanted, I burn.
III.
Dangerous as the 19th century:
The girl who wants and must be cut for it.
What is the removal of a female organ,
of a girl-child, of the poor uterus of me,
of the broken life-giver in me, to do—
consigned to a steel plate and then to the place
where all dead things heap and rot?
Deep down, the spirit of me thinks
it is a sickening at this world of men.
IV.
If I told you anger saved me when I was too weak to save me, when I was too small to try,
that she was the sole thing that kept me alive, would you love her then?
V.
Anthropocene, Holocene, homicide.
I don’t take the animal nature
of my body as unalterably solid.
My wrists can break, my breath has, on occasion, stopped.
I’ve gone blue with longing,
run red as war. I’ve battle scars
and I’ve birthed a girl. I’ve been ugly as battles
between us. Always, I’ll be bound by the leather
skin-sack that bolts me together.
VI.
Unless I burn.
VII.
What did it feel like for the women before me,
to burn as if the deaths of their husbands
robbed them of the right to breathe?
The asphyxiation of an idea
and all the little witches that came after
flood the globe. If they could grow gills,
breathe water, extinguish flame,
and return, no skin to bind them,
where would their hands wander?
VIII.
I am less without anger.
I want fire and strangers.
I want sand in my nails, in my clothes.
To be of tree and wood and to lay in the grass.
If I could deflect our evolution,
what color would I paint it?
Of our history, a scar. Of the scar, black.
The women who rise are often fallen and we know,
by now, a tree that falls, doesn’t just fall: It crashes.
IX.
I love Daphne like the river.
X.
Apollo, be damned. Bring on the night.
Sanjana Nair’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Fence Magazine, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, and The Equalizer. In a prior lifetime, she was part of a performative series in NYC named Emofru and The Lady Apple. Her collaboration between poet and composer was performed at Tribeca’s Flea Theater as well as featured on NPR’s Soundcheck. Nair lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, and is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).
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