TWO POEMS by Vandana Khanna

by Vandana Khanna / Thursday, 15 November 2018 / Published in Issue 14

CREATION MYTH

This is how the whole holy mess
went down: cue the girl in tone-deaf
gold, drama thick in her blood. Their
love always caught in the underworld
or the other world. All vendetta and Vedas.
She woke from dreams silted with arrows,
broken teeth, the man-smell still sharp
and human on her. The birds nearsighted
with melancholy. Her heart wintering
over some god she’ll probably never
see again. He tells her to play dead, that
no one will notice— just another girl
from some hill town with her lotus-petal
eyes walking into a forest on fire.

SELF PORTRAIT AS A GIRL, ONLY PART MIRACLE

This air full of birdsong and chatter,
this girl only part miracle. He as the god

with many heads whose tongues swell
from all the lies pulled from them—

one thorn and nettle at a time.
He as a reminder that sweetness

is only a prelude to pain: what he
couldn’t love, he sent back out

into the jungle, let the animals
have at it. This: the price of freedom.

This: the remnants of love. Your mother
tells you over and over — don’t be just a girl.

You wish she’d teach you something
that would make you belong to this world.

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Tagged under: poem, Poetry, Vandana Khanna

About Vandana Khanna

Vandana Khanna is the author of two full length collections, Train to Agra and Afternoon Masala, as well as the chapbook, The Goddess Monologues. Her poems have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, and the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner and Guernica. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.