because you didn’t wash the dishes
Shlagha Borah
I was groped by our friend on Diwali the eggshells broke we were on a bench
we stepped on lava I leaned onto dirt he leaned onto me mirroring the moon
its whiteness its paleness the nothingness the everythingness
of the trees their pirouette didn’t pause
for three days shaped into a week we mutinied the dishwasher
outside dogs barked the ironer barked it didn’t matter because
where we live we wash our dishes our visceral selves
by hand by foam by muscle memory the lights went out food turned frost
we erased a friend we kept fighting over whose fault it was
Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Longleaf Review, Rogue Agent, Nonbinary Review, long con magazine, Ninety Seven Poems (Terribly Tiny Tales & Penguin), and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and volunteers as a Poetry Reader at Grist. A Brooklyn Poets ’22 Fellow and recipient of the 2023 Spring Fellowship from Sundress Academy for the Arts, she co-founded Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. Instagram: @shlaghab Twitter: @shlaghaborah
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