currency by Indrani Sengupta

because blood oaths are overrated, I make mine with anyone:

the cracked cup. the cotton shift. the synchronies of women,

what I set my clocks upon. I dream us in our bedroom hair 

and each others’ rouge. I dream us daisy-chained like paper dolls, 

vague woman-hems delimiting the forest line. each less precise 

than the one before, than the cutter would will it. here, in the dream, 

we stare ahead at the same resplendent nothing. our griefs are 

made-up words we pantomime against the ghost gums of winter. 

a bookkeeper’s lament, a keeling. a half-imagined pipe we drag 

through the gapping of two fingers. our griefs transformed in the half-light

of a woman’s turning away. we are nothing alike. one says you are

family now I smell myself on you. one asks what do you look like when

I look away. one says when I split me I spill you. and why shouldn’t I do. 

am I not sack shimmy and slip. am I not squid-inked across the prairie. 

am I not gold.  am I not glitter.  who should spend me if not me?

Indrani Sengupta is a poet from Kolkata, India, currently braving Illinois weather. A senior staff reader for Lantern Review, she received her MFA in poetry from Boise State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Quarterly West, American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, Indiana Review, and elsewhere.

18 October 2021