Member Poem

the masks that the fishermen of
sundarbans wear to ward away tigers.
i found one of them in an evening of hunger.
to touch it was like an anthill, a clogged sinkhole.

the sun was bobbing in the sky
like an egg in the curry more oil than memory.
there had been a cloud of lighter fluids
on which the precariat graze fire
with their cigarette snouts.

we were walking on a road we hadn’t taken.
to our left blue bogeys of goods trains sprawled
like a tumour lily in an algal bloom.
to our right railway quarters ribboned with red tape
and limed in pensioned nostalgia.
when from behind a pack of three men on a bike prowl past us
their faces turned back, staring, leering, like masks.
the tigers in us maimed to cats.
our stripes stripped to make railway tracks.
whiskers turned to kitestrings and pipecleaners.
eyes museumized to gaze back at us later.

you might think this is where i found the mask
but no. even though i wished my thumbs blood-deep
in their eyeballs, twist their craned necks into spine-cracking knots.
still staring, their masks were now their lidless faces
and their actual faces just the shape a woman’s fear takes.
in their gaze we singe into just her, she into just woman,
a woman into just body.

that’s where i found the mask:
just ahead from where we turned back in fear
untaken, the sceptral mask of being a man in a man’s world.

~ ajay