EGO presents poetry by Sharanya Manivannan. Sharanya Manivannan was born in India in 1985 and grew up in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. She is working on her first novel, Constellation of Scars, and has completed a book of poems entitled Witchcraft. As a spoken word artist, she has performed at dozens of venues in the last six years, from small indie cafes to the Borobudur Temple, Indonesia. Between August 2007 and February 2008, she has or will be performing at the Utan Kayu International Literary Biennale in Indonesia, Singapore Writers' Festival, and Kitab in Mumbai. Sharanya can be reached at http://sharanyamanivannan.blogspot.com.




CANTE JONDO IN THE NEYTAL VEIN
(after Namalvar and Lorca)

Beyond this, what more is there?

There are coasts in me, whose
borders I trace faithfully, my ankle bells
quietly slipping into lapping waves, the
bangles loosening from my wrists and
submerging.

Somewhere beyond the horizon,
my heart beats in the body of another.

My body, derelict, dark as a mango leaf
My soul the sapphire of a waterlily by the shore

and you,
my rough, dark diamond,
stolen by the sea.


BLOOD LOTUS

I want to be absolutely primitive.
I want to dip my fingers and
hold them against the light, the sweet,
sticky scarlet of maraschino cherries
glazed upon them. I am waiting.
No lunar calendar resounds
within the cathedral of my uterus,
no tidal magnetism aligns the
compass of my body.
These are walls, and like walls they
forbid. An embargo of blood. No
deliverance in this famine save my
clitoris – my lotus belled like a cat
or a small god no one claimed.

How the body betrays. I begin
to dream in clichés of rivers,
and then of small plants
bursting above ground,
entangling my feet, becoming
my skin itself. To be of the earth
is to be of exile, that much I
already know. And what then,
to be of the body, but betrayed by it?

I want my communist red, my pompadour.
Valentines and capsicums. Coral.
The devil and her lipstick both. I want
Kieślowski's third and Williams' wheelbarrow.
Firefighter red. Fire red. Fire truck aflame red.
Give me crimson, give me vermillion, give me blush
and claret, wine and rubies, Rudolph's
nose and old-fashioned kisses on an
envelope meant for a red-letter day.
Give me eloquence. Give me flood.
Give me joy, give me pain, give me
myself again. Give me the
colour of liberty, desire, fury and disgrace.
The colour of murder and love.
Give me taboo.

There's a bull circling
the arena, I smell its hooves,
its hide. Its lust and relish
hang like omens in the air.
I dance with this red
banner, awaiting it,
negotiating its
unseen prowl,

but I am the loneliest matador.


FIRST LANGUAGE

There’s a ghost of
another language
shadow-dancing
under my words.
A phantom
tongue that unravels
like liquor, inspires
like song.

I need this language.
I need its curlicues of nuance,
its coconut-husk hardness,
its sweet sexy pulp once
it’s been broken in. I need its weight;
history, memory, tyranny, art.
I need to be reminded what
impostors
my words are
to the spirit that births them,
the spirit that thrums
in them, taut, deep, echoing.

I breathe in one language and
exhale in another.


LINEA NEGRA

I like when women keep their secrets
because then I know all the better
how to slip inside and disarm them.

Ay, don’t disbelieve me – it’s not my
diffidence that demands surrender.

All day I kick up dust in a skirt that rustles like rumour
and a flagrance of flowers in my hair.
I wait for you, my darling. I wait to trace
with fingertip and murmured lip
this line like an equator
from the sunburst of your navel
to your dark-petalled heart.

A navel like a jewel is a cliché, but mine
wears a scar where a sequence of diamonds once was.
And yours, yours is the one from which

nations are disassembled,
border lines drawn.
this is no mere pigment – this is demarcation.

And
This. Is desire

I think of the Dogon myths of weaving the world
from speech where thread
should have emerged
from between our ancestress’ teeth.
This thread by which your birth is bound
to birth.

This dark line of convergence.

You’re a girl with a heart like jacarandas
And I – a dangerous, dangerous woman.

Come. Let me unravel you.




Photographs: Water Lily by Abeer Hoque, Pasir Ris by Sharanya Mannivanan