Aishwarya Sahi

from The Antigone Sonnets

Sonnet That is the Beginning

I’ve been taking these pills lately—these shapes of pills.

Green disk. White orb. Yellow hexagon.

I arrange them in a neat little line,

prop my phone against a stack of books

and watch a baby mewling on the other side.

Spent the week hunched over a toilet bowl,

crying like a bird in its bitterness.

My witness a dead Greek tragedist.

All speech whining and foolish entreaty.

No tact. All deference. Such smallness

it could make your bones rattle.

I’m ashamed. I’m grateful. He says,

nothing that is vast enters the life

of mortals without a curse. He’s lying.

Sonnet about Translation

I’ve been trying to convert this grouchy old man

from Hindi to English. Did I say convert? I meant

translate. From Hindi to English. Don’t know how

to do it since all he seems to write about is being

accosted by young women on his deathbed.

Once my lover was a dwarf accosted by young

women at parties. I keep writing ‘my’ when I mean ‘by’.

The confusion between pronoun and preposition

a vying for attention between lesser parts.

In Antigone, there’s no such confusion between

by-ness and my-ness. By Oedipus. By a double blow.

By public stoning. A real performance of consequence.

Then, my sister. My own mother. My brother.

An overstatement of filiality. How could they be mixed up?

Sonnet about Man from Michigan

I’ve been seeing this man from Michigan. A doctor.

Used to be in the army. Very handsome. He’s put on

some weight now and likes to talk about how the army

was a unique experience. How he’s killed some people

in some war-torn country. Regrets it. No point asking

for particulars. Says he’d read “Invictus” when things

got tough: Out of the night…Black as a pit…

Something like that. In Antigone, the chorus,

that temporal unit located outside the absolute past,

says the curse rolls up black sands from the depths.

Oedipus’s curse. That stain Antigone can’t escape.

And thus, she is vaulted so the city can avoid a public stain.

It’s March in Houston. It’s damp. A little muggy.

I toss a crane fly off the bench. It’s missing a leg.