Lopa Banerjee (Colours of Love and Barriers)

Lopa Banerjee

Lopa Banerjee is an author, poet, translator, editor with seven books and five anthologies (fiction/nonfiction & poetry). She lives in Texas, USA and teaches Creative Writing at Texas Christian University.

Musings of the Misaligned (Prose-poem) 

(1) 

A calamity, a catastrophe, fighting a fight deep within, the topography of my body doesn’t know what my lips, my bare mouth, the ocean of wants between my legs will spell, day by day, in the name of the elusive ‘Love’, a badly broken patch of truth that I crave to embrace with my core. A lonely island, nestled between the folds and creases of the binary, ‘normal’ world, the non-binary, non-conformist me burns, writhes, moans —-in this hopeless ordeal of breaking shackles, of ravaging barriers, the bitter juices of the aftermath of truths scalding, traversing the ridges and flat, prairie lands of my battle-torn being. 

In my remembrance of all my ancestors, either earthen women smelling of homes and hearths, or sunken valleys of men, journeying towards the hills of male valor, my nameless, sexless bubbles melt, disperse and are born anew. From the wet world of womb, flesh and love that I came, my dark body crawls the traffic of the cursive world, and I survive, I survive, I survive. 

 

(2) 

An empty, unsafe world, unsettling tears find home in the calamity, the catastrophe of my body. The topography of my body still doesn’t know the essence of the cracked earth of my gender, and yet, love, the deep, silent revolution inside, builds up her empire. Your earth, my earth, our earth smells the same, but we still theorize the musk of our sex. 

You told me long before where my dark entity came from, when it was all but the absence of light in your every pore. In my dark, a whole spectrum of the colors of love shone, when it was you who dictated I couldn’t become a girl, slowly waking from the belly of feminine dreams, when it was you who made it clear I couldn’t be a wife, when it was you who said there was no music in my womb to create children, my misaligned spirit and body bore the crushing weight of the aftermath of those truths. And now, in my infertile womb, a hundred dream children wax and wane, all neutral in gender, requiems of the life in which I’ve breathed, in which I’ve stormed over the horizon like coarse, struggling undercurrents, in which I’ve loved the coitus with this earth in unquestioned surrender.

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Colours of Love :: Setu, July 2022