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A girl can dream —

hold her breath through the fire
run past the cutthroats and gossips
and thorns. The villains that would
touch her hair, the husbands that
would break everything gold in her.
Her muddy face in the river its own
terrible consolation, her body on
its last penance. Half of her goddess
forest-frayed. The other, threadbare
shaped by ash. Her dreams, all bristle
and bark, small as they need to be.
You must be a god to survive this world.

* * *

The Goddess Born Stubborn

I set my jaw against your prayers,
showed you where the wounds
left stardust on my skin, where
the bones broke into branches.

I buried my wildness under
the heavy swamp of heartbeat.
Let spite stiffen my spine, seal
my girl-lips against the chanting.

Then I’d make sure no one
missed me. Then, I’d wish
all between us had burned.

Vandana Khanna’s book, Burning Like Her Own Planet, is out this month from Alice James Books.

Vandana Khanna
Vandana Khanna is the author of two full-length collections, Train to Agra and Afternoon Masala. Her poems have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The New Republic, New England Review, and Guernica. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review.
http://www.vankhanna.com/