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  • How the Suitors Woo, and: Penelope at Her Baths
  • Vandana Khanna (bio)

How the Suitors Woo

With brawn and cudgel, with a pluckedbunch of forget-me-knots’ waxy stemsbleeding all over the floor. With the bullof a brute and a half-black heart.

One drunk-dials me, throwing tinyconstellations of pebbles at my window.Another pounds on the wood planksof my heart until I relent and unlock the latch.The one with the well-water eyes offersto glue all the chipped china back togetherwith his sweat. Then wants to fix the faultydrawbridge with woolly ropes of his hair.

One will want me for makeup sex, anotherfor breakup sex. They all want me to tidyup my hysterics and put meat on my bones.

They expect me to rah, rah when theyland on my shores with nothing but theirforearms thick as hemp to recommend them.Their blood-song will fill my throat withthe melancholy of wine turned tart in the middleof the night when all I want is to be left alonewith my bottle and my bad luck. [End Page 41]

Penelope at Her Baths

Here, a wet solace without mystery, without creaturespulled to shore. Shadows paint over toes, over a basinof shallow thighs—the drag of currents in methat I can’t name.

My floating its own kind of aloneness—my body,a timepiece ticking off the hours, beat by beat.

Here, the city of men can wait. The great hallwith its wine can wait. All their seasick staresrinsed from my skin—their smoke and ashand sweat. The sweet stink of them.

I imagine myself nymph—the wet-clingof hair, a lotus blooming from between my legs.So much empty space.

Water lifting this body as offering to the stars’insistent pulse. In all their jeweled beautyI forget the emptiness that surrounds them.

What I want—fixed, unchangeablein the failing light. This night a premonition,

ends like all the others—with a swollen prayerrising briny from my mouth, filling the spacebetween me and sky, earth and the heavens.

All of it bared, stripped clean. [End Page 42]

Vandana Khanna

Vandana Khanna is the author of two collections of poetry, Train to Agra (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2001) and Afternoon Masala (University of Arkansas Press, 2014), and the chapbook The Goddess Monologues (Diode Editions, 2016). Her poems have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and have appeared in publications such as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Guernica. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.

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