In mirrors, we, world-weary women and world-worrying women

see all things born and all things unborn that burdened and blurred

with eyes of kohl and lips with dye, will die. But we braid our hair 

like prayer beads, snapping strands of illusions that confine. 

Is a mango fruit its punctured peel or flesh within? 

Flesh that ripes and rots and feeds friends and flies

Or is the mango simply its seed? Hard but holding from concave 

to concave, mother goddess to ghoul-mother,

sweet-smelling kondrai and the scent of burnt cities three,

This place and That – beyond these seas of poison, where we

World-weary women and world-worrying women 

are unburdened by skin, singing to He who frees.

…

Niveditha K Prasad is an undergraduate student and has previously published in Café Dissensus. When not preoccupied with a seemingly inane law school to-do list, she spends her time watching movies, re-reading TS Eliot and Joan Didion and trying to scribble words. You can find some of those scribblings here.