As I empty my menstrual cup, I think of the Venus flytrap
Squatting on the bathroom floor, toes curled against the wet,
I imagine the inside of a bladderwort and its watery grave.
Twist the silicon smoothness of an orchid into a petal,
honeytrap a beguiling bee into its sac. A terrarium inside
the body. A swamp transparent to hunger. Ingest pain.
A chlorophyll trapdoor guards the inner chambers,
and only the succulent can pass. Darwin kept asking
‘What kind of intelligence is this?’ Did he mean
attraction or intuition? Or did he mean the ship
that curved around the islands? Let the bee fly past?
The miracle is that the plant can think when to close
its door, when to feed its hunger. That death is inevitable.
That the Venus flytrap makes a show of it in its sticky belly.
The Wait
When men adventured to find gold, did they feel fear? Did they drink, or laugh loudly? Did they blink their eyes to the harsh gaze of the sun? Did they feel the deep ocean below their necks at night? I read that women chewed cassava roots to make kasiri in hollowed stems. Their saliva made ferment. They liked to see everyone drunk in the evenings. Deep sleep. When they hack mangrove roots for oysters in the morning, everything grows back. The grass needs cutting every year. The palm is heavy with nuts again. The worm grows back twice when cut in half. The tide goes away and comes back. The little crabs roll sand balls to make burrowed homes. They start again after the waves. A night dark ant pinches its pincers, and walks on the cool of my desk. Brown leaves cover the forest floor and stare back at life replacing them. It is only us who don’t want to go away. We wait. You and I, we forgot to leave.
Kinjal Sethia
Kinjal Sethia is a writer based in Pune. Her work has been published in nether Quarterly, Usawa Literary Review, The Bangalore Review, Out of Print, among other places. She is the Associate Editor for Fiction at The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM).
“Silver globe”
Header artwork by contributor Leslie Brown
Her work has appeared in “Closed eye open,” Zoetic Press, “NBR: World Tour,” Phoebe Literary Journal, Beyond Words, Scapegoat Review, Quibble Lit and Burningword literary journal.
