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Thirteen
I found her as a whispered line in an editorial
stuck on the silk folds of a silver jubilee
like regret.
She had bled once in a different continent
A red thread pulled taut at thirteen
Doctors sealed the loom forever.
I was thirteen too, still learning the
topography of my brown skin.
My hands trembled like birdcage doors
unsure whether to open or close.
The article was a medical moonspeak
which orbited her wound like gravity.
Her body was an eclipse,
a shadow swallowing the sun before its rise.
Some thresholds are chasms I learned that day
shaped like hospital beds,
where young girls are unravelled.
The editorial has faded like old ink
on rain-soaked newsprint, but her sentence lingers.
And I am still standing barefoot at the edge,
where pain and empathy hold hands
like hesitant strangers beneath the doorway called thirteen.
Copyright ©
abdul Mannan
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