Pratik : PRATIK LA SPECIAL ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: AMERICAN POET VANDANA KHANNA's "Creation Myth"

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

PRATIK LA SPECIAL ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: AMERICAN POET VANDANA KHANNA's "Creation Myth"

VANDANA KHANNA

Creation Myth

You’re a different kind of girl, one

only a god could love, one the animals

spurn because they like you better lonely.

Creation isn’t for the faint of heart.

Let him fashion you from sandalwood

and stardust and soap. From navel and seed.

Give up all the thin hymns you once knew.

Become a bird that never shuts up, a river

that won’t bend easily to drama.

Become a tangle of wives, the tight clutch

of girls, a swarm of goddesses.

Wake from the tiger in your dreams

and with all the hands you are given,

pull at the thick, gold scruff of this world.

Vandana Khanna is the author of two collections of poetry, Train to Agra and Afternoon Masala, and the chapbook, The Goddess Monologues. Her poems have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and has appeared in publications such as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner and Guernica. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.

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