The Unworn

by Aardhra Chandran

The pleats are iron teeth.
They close around her hips.

Six yards of starched cotton
draw her upright—
a coffin of cloth,
stiff with hair oil,
sour with old sweat.

Her collarbone, a fractured spindle,
splinters beneath the silver border,
each thread pulling like lead.

She does not speak of distance.
She speaks of salt going damp in the jar,
of evening moisture
eating through the baseboards.

At midnight,
the floorboards contract.
Wood cracks
like a small bone
in an empty room.

I feel her erasure—
jagged, lodged in my throat,
a swallowed needle.

A lifetime weaving a shroud,
then being made
to wear it alive.

Aardhra Chandran is a poet and postgraduate student from Kerala, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Gulmohur Quarterly, Bloodroot Poetry Journal, Rust & Moth, Zhagaram Literary Magazine, Philly Chapbook Review, Punch Magazine, among others.