The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Language of the Wound is Love by Megha Sood

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Ten Ways of Looking at Hunger

I

Stars dazzle in the ashen sky on a cold night streaming and making long traces
of hopes bouncing from one end to another, tracing a path for you to place
your wish. A wish is hunger in its infancy.

II

A simmering passion rises from the dearth of your acceptance, birthing at the
corners of your mouth. Lingering desire scorched by societal norms and you
wait to exist in a different dimension. The language of the wound is love.

III

A cold gaze on the morning of the funeral waits to gulp down the memories,
as you bury the remnants of your happiness in a warm womb of trowled earth,
whose skin is broken by the lash of overnight rains. Acceptance is a fallacy.

IV

An incessant desire to look for the likeness of the soul, as your identity sits
like a square knob in the circular opening of this godforsaken life, and your
identity is solely defined by what lies between your soft supple thighs. Love is
an elegy for acceptance.

V

An uninterrupted clacking of soft beaks, as it waits for the next morsel, pushed
down its supple throat as fledglings make their home in the oak tree in my
courtyard and I think of a thousand ways to call their hunger my own.

VI

A desire for survival as the frail scorched hands of a child hold the photo of
their bombed city, carrying the identity of a refugee, looking for a stranger’s
embrace. A single night demarcates your identity.

VII

Searching for a definition of elusive peace, as he breaks another morsel from
the dried rye bread making a constellation around his courtyard, giving
sustenance to the gray-winged visitors flocking his courtyard. A lame excuse to
fill the emptiness in his weary old heart.

VIII

A life nothing but a deluge of expectations, waiting to jump across the gushing
terrain, in a race for survival, spawning only to meet death in a run for life. A
shimming desire in the cold white eye of a salmon.

IX

An unsung, unfinished lullaby that will haunt their existence forever, as they
decide on the color of the coffin matching the dress of her doll, thinking of
ways to bring that last phantom smile to her face.

X

Hunger speaks in thousands of ways, in a language unknown to many, and
yet cleaves a soul asking for more. Making thin sluices of suffering, desire, and
loneliness, scratching a path in our existence to carry pain. A flute carved deep
to sustain melody

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