I like it when groups of children visit the river bank
looking for ammonites, echinoids and belemnites:
their ears like a sharp, open-mouthed whelk. To find
lexicon for the old Cretaceous worlds we originated
from, is to find a key to mapping the strange histories
of our bodies: clavicle/drumstick/femur/tendon.
My history has deep gulfs in its narratives, and often
while recounting my traumas I forget how they came
to be. Like a giant whale belly-flopping in my mind,
scattering the rings of data that dendrochronologize
my familial pain: was it the desiccated sap of my mother
that shrunk our house into a stump or was it the towering
girth of my father growing on our backs like an epiphyte.
But what I never forget is that at nights, I would watch them
slipping into that otherness of sleep: grief wrapping their
ancient-bodies like the exoskeletal shells of gastropods.

Kunjana Parashar is a poet from Mumbai whose work appears or is forthcoming in Lammergeier, UCity Review, Riggwelter, The Hellebore, Barren Magazine, The Rumpus (ENOUGH Section), and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @wolfwasp.