“Bloodline” and Other Poems

by Kinjal Sethia

Bontyanak - From Earth to Womb (2021), Handmade soft pastels of plant pigments and earth minerals, acrylic, oil pastels and charcoal on stretched canvas. 
Image description: The painting consists of bold, vivid lines stretching across the vertical canvas, forming dynamic, abstract patterns. In the top left corner, a flower emerges from the patterns.

Bloodline

Of all the seeds pushed into the soil, of all the pollens whispered

into the breeze, some are reduced to barren mud. Nothing sprouts

from them, nothing grows. They are food, stumbles on a protein

pyramid. Caesuras in the germinate narrative. Lapses. 

The disappointing ones. The wastrels, the unpupating larvae, 

the tubes full of empty ovum, the parch of cracked land that let 

life seep away. Sometimes, these bare membranes see sunlight. 

Maybe, someone fed water into the dewdrop. Before it glistened 

at dawn. Maybe, there is a dendrite network under some skins. 

Like the roots of a birch that feeds nutrients to the axed trunk 

of a fir tree. An adopted child. A mycorrhizal system of empty 

and burdened wombs. Connected by roots. An underground 

kinship, a family that is confusing to outsiders. Who adopts 

whom? Who says this is the mother, and this the child?

Bontyanak - Diwata (2023), Handmade soft pastels of plant pigments and earth minerals, acrylic, oil pastels and charcoal on stretched canvas. 
Image description: The abstract painting, rendered in dark shades of green, brown, blue, and purple, consists of various natural motifs such as leaves and branches. They are rendered across the canvas in undulating, fluid brushstrokes. 

Sea Spill

after Arthur Sze

The fishermen at Bogmalo cast in their nets and wait, hold

                                        the wooden poles against the sea drag.

I pace the marbled floor at four a.m. Hoping for some sediment

                                        air to settle. Filter the sludge, unearth.

The house is still. Scraping sounds of sleep breathe on my family

                                         under the blanket whir of the split AC.

I swirl the diluvian dredges of the coffee. The angry barks of a pine

                                         tree at the edge of a forest fire. I stumble

on the legs of the wooden desk, shatter the cup. Spill black on a blank

                                         page. Sand dunes under a cold full moon night.

How does one enter the womb of a cork tree? How can the mountain peak

                                         pull clouds around itself when it feels lonely?

How does the moon push tides into the beach, and splash the feet of men

                                        waiting to haul in the net? Fishes thrashing, motes

in an agitated sunlight. Splaying, lashing for life. Winds in the pine tree.

                                         Words dead as they are pulled on a page.

Bontyanak -  Sirih pulang ke gagang III (2022), Handmade soft pastels of plant pigments and earth minerals, acrylic, oil pastels and charcoal on stretched canvas. 
Image description: The painting is rendered in a soft, pastel palette featuring shades of green, pink, purple, and yellow. Dynamic brushstrokes form abstract patterns resembling plants and mountains, forming a rich, whimsical landscape.  

The Soothsayer’s Granddaughter

At birth, she whispered the chants of the night in my ears.

In the morning, she smeared river clay on my head.

I learnt the language of her Devis and could speak the words

of her ash-dipped finger, the way she made letters

from broken grass. Taught me to utter untrembled voices.

We had only the words of the Kutchi language.

Ach to say come, Ve o say sit, and Achija to say come again

but to mean leave now. We’d rather see your back,

not your ladle-deep eyes, that speak only of hunger.

She drew me a map of her desires. To circumnavigate

the galaxy, peek inside a supernova. To dip a toe

inside a constellation and to press her thumb

into the thighs of a dancing Shiva. To pull his uncombed hair,

to make him laugh. One night, I dreamt

she was mad and woke up to see her staring into my sleep.

I pulled her under my eyelids, she also dreamt

for me. When she left with her trench-deep eye, the Rann

roared in a banshee sorrow. I kept a part of her.

To live properly now will be to keep her hidden, under a thumb,

pressed into my pillow. Her blue eyes pulsing from the sky,

at night, when it stops raining. The cracked roof of her house

gaps a smile at the cloudy sky. I smell her, sometimes.

In the hinges of her clay house, the termite pillars. She still speaks

of coming with me to the bus stop outside this parch-lipped hamlet.

---

Kinjal Sethia is a writer based in Pune, India. Her work has been published in nether Quarterly, Usawa Literary Review, EKL Review, and Samyukta Fiction among other places. She is the Associate Editor for Fiction at The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM).

*

Bontyanak is a multidisciplinary artist from Malaysia. Their practice centres around cultivating a resting space for dreaming. Dreaming as an act of prayer and rest as a sacred defiance. A prayer to build worlds beyond the colonial imagination. A portal to invite our hidden parts to come out and play. Illuminating the unseen and transcending the illusions of binary systems.

---