ADVENT DAY 25 * MINAL HAJRATWALA!

SAYING IT/NOT SAYING IT 

AT THE DODGE POETRY FESTIVAL

It has stopped being possible to sleep with the windows open.

Still, by 8 p.m., everyone is home.     I recognize their furniture

& envy their arrangements.     The wood itself, cheap & light, is

just like mine,    identical

to the surface, to the leg.

He slips & calls her Jane, then stops.      —I forget, are you ‘Lynn’ 

at this event?     —Yes, she says, but I’m ‘coming out’ as Jane. 

—Your name is Jane? asks the woman who’d thought they were friends.

—Yes, says Jane.    —Why? say I.

She explains; my envy        brakes.

Published poets discourse at picnic tables under rain. Brando & macho,   

rich tourists in poor places,     to free or not to free verse,     she a quiet 40s white woman in a suit

in the jungle. Jane. The other woman says 

—Marie Howe said to replace

was          with any other verb.

—It would be interesting, she explains to Jane, for you to try to write

about rape or incest without using the words.     Jane nods,

agrees too quickly,     —Yes it would be interesting, very, it’s

interesting, would,

yes,      interesting.

I think, Surely that is how we write it.     I am home now

looking out.     Without the word we write it in the neck     & in 

the plumbing, we write it in the bright, in every tyger we write it.

The husband of Jane says,    —But,

honey, you never use those words.

Minal Hajratwala<www.minalhajratwala.com> is a poet, publisher, author, and writing coach. This poem is reprinted with permission from her collection Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment (2014), published by The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective<www.greatindianpoetrycollective.org>, a new collective press focusing on  poetry from global India. Her nonfiction epic Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents won four literary awards, and she is the editor of an anthology, Out! Stories from the New Queer India. Follow her on Twitter @minalh or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/minalhajratwala. 

*

Here's your chance to be a hero and bring poetry from India to the world: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-great-indian-poetry-collective/ Thank you for clicking, sharing, funding, and loving our vision of awe-inspiring global poetry! 

Curatorial note: The following poems are a response to a call for poetry about 

rape culture for the annual Delirious Advent Feature; the call is in turn an 

immediate response to the Rolling Stone story “A Rape on Campus” about rape 

culture at the University of Virginia. However, they are also part of a larger 

conversation about rape in poetry communities. Curated by Jessica Smith and 

Susana Gardner.