Hoofsound

When she raged, a flame  
travelled the outline of my mother’s body,  
passed her lips,                detonated— 
ripples across her saltwater eyes.             No one holds 
a horse’s stare at its loudest neigh.               When its knees  
tremble from tremors of expectation;         lamenting  
its cherubic past,      memory’s sole artifact. 
Once I was  
a creature in my mother’s belly.  
When she was sad, she ate  
nothing;                     hunger  
a second child kicking inside her.               
She listened to my kicking for months,           the foal’s hoofsteps  
in her bellyful               of crushed leaves,          drowning hunger’s wail  
from the adjacent room.  Amplifying it so— 

metimes, like an alarm clock ticking with twice 
the guilt.                       In my teens, when I looked into  
hunger’s hollow eyes, recognized 
the ache that chained us both                       to our stable, I— 
dentified us: mother and son—                    gentle animals  
neighing their pangs into the night. Wearing the saddle 
like a jacket from the cold, hooves’ drumbeat  
pulsing through the heart of trees.        Once,  
when someone pointed to her bare stomach, she called her  
stretchmarks old bruises. As if the present is a band-aid  
built out of many calendars.  
As if all  
that the mare knows of sadness  
is to gallop away. As if all 
her hoofsound echoes  
is her foal’s hunger.  

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Debmalya Bandyopadhyay is a writer and mathematician based in Birmingham, UK. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ghost City Review, LEON Literary Review, Couplet Poetry, Sontag, Propel, and Anthropocene Poetry, among others. His work has been selected for Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2023) and he was a finalist for SweetLit’s 2024 Poetry Prize. He can often be found in parks confabulating with local birds.

Published October 15 2024