Witch Hindu
curry nipple / shrapnel bindi / lassi whiplash / lengha language / rumproof canefield / erotic indenture / henna pregnancy / golden roti / chocolate kajal / pagan burial / choke me / kindly in / these archives / camphor mothbites / grandmother’s saris / drowning dowry / wield the / mace and / master me
this is not a burning / these are not white spells
witch hindu walks everywhere on blue throated feet
scattering febrile cockheads, emptying all bad seed
witch hindu knows your atmosphere, can taste it in
the charnel house your kind raped my kind adjacent
to without a single prayer for the irradiated skin, o
witch hindu promises you will not be able to think of
sorries in the land where reparations are drawn first
from the battlements of your thighs, o descendants
of sailors and minstrels of thanes and thieves and kin
who walk upright and never permit their girlfriends
to come
witch hindu has a ceremony for you under the cutlass
of her tongue, gathering all the hymens of indenture
in her four arms as ribboning hurricanes, glowering
pregnant, growing darjeeling and lanate and rum
mortuary deya / guillotine kohl / grandfather’s cutlass / hidden beef / halogenic boneshards / India, disgorged / these archives / kindly / choke in me / consummation dagger / turban deathmask / holy pornshop / hunted bride / translucent elephant / trampling down
these are not white burnings / this is not your spell
Copyright © 2021 by Shivanee Ramlochan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 26, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote ‘Witch Hindu’ as a way to strive to be more solidly in the world. Archetypes of powerful women have always been important to my survival, and I needed to create a space in my mind and heart where the strongest woman I know also looked and sounded like a direct foremother of my Indo-Caribbean ancestry. I carry all the women who’ve birthed, labored and persisted in my family line within me, and I want always to do them proud, to use my poems to say, ‘This is how we’ve survived the worst things done to us.’”
—Shivanee Ramlochan
Shivanee Ramlochan
Shivanee Ramlochan is an Indo-Caribbean poet and the author of Unkillable (Noemi Press, 2022) and Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017). The recipient of residencies and grants from Catapult Caribbean Arts, Bread Loaf, and Millay Arts, she lives in Las Lomas, Trinidad.