by Shefali Banerji

I wrote my first poem as a foetus, traced a rhyme against mother’s body. It appeared on her skin, mimicking cobwebs running amok. I didn’t know her body was a stencil until I knew it to be home. The words had just begun to grow a little tall, a little wide, a little big, bigger still & I was impatient so I carved them upon clenched fists, thighs, knees, a new riverine each day bent out of shape, life, blood, form, meter, until I ran out of space. Mother taught me lullabies of her tongue & I, little fool, drove them out of memory; only to make way for silly kicks & out-of-order gods – while men of letters & flesh hung around the curb, watching the drama unfold. When I look back now at the half-drunk ellipses & expositions, I see how my spine became the sum total of every defiant line that ever could rebel against itself & run on into the next, pushed along until it no longer could find an end to its means or an anecdote, a verb, a catching of breath. I see how I allowed my ribs to heave & sigh beneath unformed breasts, weave tales of regret, draw in from the marrow a D-I-Y kit for disaster. Build it from scratch, nurture it, water it, tuck it in bed, kiss it goodnight, before the sun sets on all our tomorrows. I wrote my first poem as a foetus against mother’s body & just as it has happened every day since, I kept my heart’s voice to myself. Mistaken for a timebomb, they declared me a case of emergency, a matter of grave concern, Frankenstein’s monster within the womb, parasite-ing her way into mother’s life, for sure. Brought out their knives, their masks, their lights, knocked me open on the table and labelled me “premature”. That, my grand entrance was the last stanza of my first poem as a foetus against mother’s body. Wedged in-between the uncertainty of living and unliving, snappy gloves and wary whispers replacing the background score, birthing into existence a half-finished song.

Shefali Banerji is a poet-performer from Kolkata, India, currently based in Vienna. A PhD researcher at the University of Vienna, working on the intersections of poetry performance and theatre, Shefali has had her work published in or featured on Poetry Wales, The Bombay Review, Kitchen Table Quarterly, ORF Niederösterreich, and elsewhere.