Petrify​

After Sylvia Plath

By Manahil Bandukwala ​

“And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum, you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table”
                  -Sylvia Plath, “The Rival”

​Making stone out of everything:
 
elephants, the flowers
withered from their trampling;
 
            palms curled over into an arch
            under which you read;
 
            yourself, yourself, yourself.
 
Your body did not decompose into dust
but began a slow petrification.
 
Waking in a mausoleum:
 
            soul squeezed out of the tips
            of your marble fingers,
 
            you were alone, the incorporeal
            part of you the texture of stone.

---

Ask

By ​​Manahil Bandukwala 

Four-year-old me slid down the base
of Minar-e-Pakistan. I wish
 
you could read Iqbal’s verses
carved in marble
 
There’s Mughal in it, see.

​Nights the court stayed up dancing
drinking bhang and pomegranate juice. Nights
 
you read Khusrau’s ghazals and fell for dhrupad music
 
swaying between brushstrokes.

*

At the minar
I made it up ninety stairs.

                          You would have climbed
all hundred and sixty-two of them
while pregnant.
 
If I could ask, before Khurram
 
                          before a single cell grew inside you
                          and grew
 
             fourteen times over, with each one
             strength siphoned away
 
did you write by the riverside
 
garden in Agra, filling bookshelves
with journals, the last one sunken into
 
Burhanpur soil? Khurram left it there
when he moved your body, no thought to bury
 
ink and paper amidst the marble coffin.
 
Did he ever listen to fumbled first drafts, or play
pretend with glass-encased ceramic animals
 
                                                   or know the poem
you read every night. The one you inked
 
in your diary at fourteen.

*

On a marble curve I traced
                                                      the slant of kaf                                
curve of meem
found in the middle                                                        

where you first fell—or maybe
it was him, who came
 
and shadowed over miniatures
painted on your fingernails.                                                                                                 In this moment
                                                                                                                               I saw his love start
 
                                                                                                                              and end with your beauty.

*

                                                                                                                              From the top of the minar
                                                                                                                                             across the skyline
                                                                                                            the smog-curtained Badshahi Masjid
 
built at the height of your son’s zeal.                                      Centuries later
 
                                                                                                       my sister painted the mosque and light
                                                                                                                                               filtered through.

---

Flee

After Padme Amidala 

By ​Manahil Bandukwala 

Mourning like a stark white sky
after a storm. Mourning like rage
and grief and rage and guilt. Mourning
so uncontrollable because of the implicit sense
 
he knew. That instead of a weapon so easily
slashed through skin,
 
had he stopped for a moment to breathe.
 
Twenty-two years of energy spent
in the lingering shadow of grief’s reminder.
 
Imagine what all those years
could have been. New schools and hospitals
and more chances for someone
like you to live.
 
If mourning never broke open
and you were still here,
 
                                       tell me, Arjumand
would you have run?

*These poems are forthcoming in Manahil Bandukwala's debut poetry collection, MONUMENT.

---

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer & visual artist. She is currently Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, & Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based writing collective VII. Her collaborative chapbook with Conyer Clayton, Sprawl | the time it took us to forget (Collusion, 2020), was shortlisted for the bpNichol Award. Her debut collection, MONUMENT, is forthcoming with Brick Books in 2022.