Moving Out
Kunjana Parashar
It wasn’t like I was a sapling uprooted with no mother tree to look after her. It was more like I was scurried out like a roach and you don’t imagine roaches as children fattened on mammary milk. Roaches have no mother, only the dark. It wasn’t like I had to flee but I had to flee. I thought of all my ancestors, refugeed, and how old this wound was, this fleeing, now seeing light through me. I mean it came to light but no light passed through it. I mean it was darker than centipedes. It was my mother who had asked me to leave. Did I say mother? I meant the whinnying of a black horse. I meant the black maw of god eating a country. I meant roaches and roaches have no mother. Only the dark.
Kunjana Parashar is a poet from Mumbai. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Indian Quarterly, ASAP|art, What Are Birds?, SWWIM Every Day, Columba, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2021 Toto Funds the Arts award for poetry and the 2021 Deepankar Khiwani Memorial Prize.