metropolitan maenad
Rupkatha Basu
under the overpass, we huddle in packs,
bare feet blistered, bare knees, chanting names
of street saints and runaway girls who carved
their freedom into rusted bridges. this is the way
we live: asphalt licked like blackened communion,
fingers sticky with spilled sugar and prayers
told to a sky smeared with diesel ghosts.
you can’t breathe deep here,
only shallow.
only fast.
with lungs full of dust.
we bait the edges of curbs with wild dares,
we are the girls who swallowed the city’s catcalls,
mouths cracked, bleeding like busted hydrants,
spitting fire back at anyone who tries to own us.
broken palms clasped around the same sharp ache,
sharing rites in alleyways where we scrape
dirt from under our nails to carve initials: to wound
concrete. the oldest teach us how to shatter soda bottles,
how to run barefoot on burning pavement
without letting the pain slow us down.
we’re wild-eyed in the crush of it, our kingdom
nothing but dead-end streets & crusted stairwells.
claustrophobic in the way our shadows
always close in too tight. we dream of high places,
whisper about leaping the bone that cages
our restless, plastic hearts. but we stay.
sworn to each other. drawn back like moths
to the trash-can fires we call holy.
we practice tearing each other open—
we dig, nails split and jagged, always digging
out pieces of each other, from under
a layer of blistered blacktop. you hold
a shred of me like a loose
tooth—bloody, precious, half-savage—and i know
one day we’ll tear each other apart like coyotes.
but for now, we’re here, tasting tar on our tongues,
yearning to shatter out, to bloom into something
the telephone towers can’t hold back.