Bailey Davis
Unbecoming
Neha Elizabeth
After Justin Danzy
Stone. The pinkness of the inner cheek turned canker. A sink in the wrong
room. Intercession, in my mother’s harrowed mouth. My mother’s mangled|
heart. My mother’s remembered bruising. The echo of empty space at the altar,
on the mountaintop, between your grasping fingers. A whimper darkened,
snuffed out. Tough scales and soft underbellies. Target practice. Arrow feast. A hit dog
cowering from revelry. Peacekeeper. Warmonger. Violence as tradition. Violence
as inheritance. A sink in the wrong resonance. Pubic bone as door knocker, pubic bone
as smoke signal. Reflecting pool staining the bedspread. Bed rot. Couch rot. Choking
on the ghost of mother tongue. Adrenaline mule, overdosed to exhaustion. Our lady
of immaculate misconceptions. The opened knife drawer at midnight. Hunger
for the turn of a steering wheel, sharply to the right and over. Predator. Prey. A sink,
and all the wrongness of it. The way grief supplicates before entering
a generation—each foot anointed with rot.
Poem for the Female Anglerfish Who Swam Up
Every white woman online is beside herself. Enough
tears to salt the ocean, and then. It must be your jaw,
the ugliness of you in open water exposed like changing
room lights – the fluorescent ways we are flayed
bare for the viewer. Was it a kind of euphoria, the oxygen
flooding your brain as you rose, your head-body blooming
as black greyed into blue? A commenter says you wanted a light
you didn’t have to make yourself. I think you wanted to eat the sun.
Every woman I know eats her own hands, takes one step at a time
in the dim light of a predetermined life. After my parents fought, my mother
would leave for hours. Later, she confessed she only sat in parking lots,
hands gripping the steering wheel, her eyes fixed on imagined flight.
I think of our family the sharp tug in her neck, the recoil of me pulling
her home. I want to tell her there is no salvation higher than your own
head, that every dazzling exit is still a euphotic death. I want her
to want to stay with me, so I fit myself into crevices
down in the blinding dark.
Neha Elizabeth is a first-generation Indian-American poet raised in New York
and currently based in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Rising
Phoenix Review and Sundog Lit. She is a 2025 Periplus Fellow.