Credit: Natalya Luchanko

Listen to Shuvangi Khadka’s reading of Family Chart at La.Lit Podcasts

My endogamous family chart

is composed of trees and

occasionally, almost rarely, shrubs.

We always choose the breed

that doesn’t flower an anomaly.

We swim within a small gene pool

making ripples that don’t drown anyone.

When my sister was married into a

long line of sacred Fig trees, we folded our

sweet dwarf roots.

We learned to run deep in soil and

bow down to the hierarchy.

The boxes are checked in match-making

with a traceable familiar map drawn on the face.

Here, unfamiliar skin territories only mean

Danger, invasion-

A risk not worth taking.

But I am in love with a boy,

with shadowless eyes, that cannot lie

and an accent tied to faraway mountains.

Teaches me a mother tongue, his mother

does not remember.

When our tongues join, I often forget my mother’s voice.

In his chest, I find the shade of a tree.

But his remnants are spotted in my family chart

occasionally, almost rarely.

So I avoid headlines about boys being chased

over the cliff,

their sin-reaching

for a happy ending, out of their reach.

Their cupid-struck hearts washed away in recurring landslides,

of bodies decaying in morgues.

With no one to question their deaths.

I avoid blunt remarks

from my crawling  neighbors

who guard our veins like their own-

with a scythe or a trident.

They tell me I am crossing the fence.

I am infiltrating the garden with

Wildflowers.

I am naïve not to understand

how seemingly harmless hemlocks

hide toxins behind their backs.

Before I know,

I steal a taste of the forbidden fruit.

At least I have not loved a herb,

a climber or a creeper.

With skilled hands, they bear flowers

plucked without remorse by others.

They live in rented compact rooms

under rented names.

Herbs don’t need big roofs to grow.

But a small piece of ground is expensive.

Instead their names are eternally etched

in steel glasses.

How dare they think of including their names

in an invitation card, taking all of us to the same

wedding party?

How dare we think of caressing the hands, accustomed

to stitch clothes with closed eyes, mend shoes,

who know the exact measurements of our foot?

But I

want to draw my own family chart

as careless as our little wild backyard,

with overgrown spikes, dandelions.

I want to grow hybrids with

soft tendrils, and strong roots inside,

I want to witness

the resistant grasses moving up the

garden ladder.

Invading our mown lawns.

Shuvangi Khadka is a spoken word poet and a freelance writer. Her other interests are reading, travelling and creating visual poetry at @shuvangi___

Listen to her reading of Family Chart at La.Lit Podcasts.