Mia Broecke
Ghazal Split: Memory Like Water
Gauri Awasthi
You step into the shower and salt rivulets down your face again.
It’s the heat or the rain or the air. You tell yourself
it didn’t happen. Images unreel like negatives, your memory is failing you.
They are blurred inconsistent evolving— it didn’t happen.
The mirror on your bathroom wall shrieks the shadow of a man:
big round bloodshot. The steam spurs recollection—
it didn’t happen? You touch the silica surface and feel your fingers melt.
Soft nimble sinewy just as they once were. You recall his face
over and over again. His hand protrudes out of the bathroom mirror,
strong cold webbed, marks the surface on your thighs, you know now it did
happen. A little girl of six or eight will make it to your dream tonight,
fragile torn broken. You shut your eyes so you can stop saying
it didn’t happen. She is screaming your name, loud and clear, you hear but don’t listen.
Shrinking dissolving steaming: My memory is failing me. It didn’t happen.
Gauri Awasthi born and raised in Kanpur, India, received her MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University. She has won awards from Yaddo, Sundress Academy For The Arts, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Hedgebrook, and Louisiana Office of Cultural Development. Her writing has been published in Best New Poets 2023, Quarterly West, Notre Dame Review, Epiphany Magazine, Nelle, The Wire, Buzzfeed, and others. She is an Associate Editor at The Offing and teaches the Decolonizing Poetry Workshop.