THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.

On meaningful evenings like these,

Content with rain, sunshine and the balance of both,

My mother comes straight to her wardrobe.

She adjusts her sari, looks for the keys and unlocks

A window to her bones and arteries.

Even when distant, you could sense the snobbery

Of silk ruffled up in hangers, giving way to

Bulgarian roses upsetting French lavender.

In here, she settles her conflicts and riddles her privacy,

Folds her complaints carefully inside her finery,

Calculates names she wants to remember and forget,

And in that drawer, she buries her wish

To freeze time and be a goddess.

On that rack, she places a jar full of rain and

Clouds, and transfers to it the warmth of the nest

Squirrels made outside her window.

And there, to the right, the cadence of

Wind chimes received on first anniversary

Competes with the absence of a gift from

Her father, murdered when she was barely three.

The albums encase the redundancy of

A banker-suitor’s photograph she had

Once been offered the hand of.

Down there, in the locker are wrapped

Letters from an affectionate nephew who

Died young, cohabiting with her forgetfulness

Of exchanging old notes after November 8.

On the wood of the wardrobe, she engraves

Her cancer-survivor-courage into tendrils

Plagiarizing stitches running down her back,

And the glass on the door shapes itself into

Silence, taking after the reflection it most

Sees before itself. On most days, she hums

Old songs into the belly of the wardrobe.

On others, she slams her anger along with its door.

Her touch-it-not attitude made me expect,

As a child of five, a Narnian door on the other side.

And all that secrecy gave birth to the family joke:

The road to a woman’s heart goes through her wardrobe.