DJINN
It takes pulse under the swollen pearl.
Low-hanging, crouched in the green dark.
Breath fusing from fermented
heat, thickened by mangos
tumbled through witchweed.
Gentle with months
of flood, the
charcoal
earth
sculpts its mirrored eyes. When you scream like
wind whipped through crag, it clots into
skin–the buzzsaw of locusts.
Crescented bark of palm
as arms. The silver
scent of Mother
after your
sister
was
born and absence of noise clayed on ear-
drums. You are barefoot and angry
at Father, ankles rippling through
Allah’s dull exhale. In
the dim halo of
trees you ask it
what it wants.
Later,
you
will tell anyone who might listen,
anyone who might believe you,
that it showed you palms rivered
with promises. Banyan
that could bleed honey.
Jambu seeds that
would turn the
land to
groves
of stars. Mount Bromo’s charred phlegm that, when
stirred into coffee, could anchor
the sun from sleep and keep the
years from running. But first,
it wants you to bare
your mouth for it.
It wants you
to let
it
place a bow of wet leaves on your tongue.
Then a child will spring. Your spittle
its ari-ari, coarse hair
exploding from your mouth–
obsidian
geyser. You
are a
child
yourself, so at this proposal, you
laugh. It rises to rage from your
refusal. A face fractured:
egg dropped against mortar.
Between the cracks, a
viscous fluid
gleams and beads
into
your
father’s face. Again, you scream, and like
a stone thrown into still swamp, his
face billows into faces
of men you will come to
know and faces of
men not yet born.
Distant and
instant,
as
though it is both in you and beyond
trace, its form begins losing core
in a howl, edges silking.
It circles your child frame,
pulling your skin to
its toothed pant. Spirals
of hollow, high
above you.
Leaking
not
a voice or a sound but sulfur. Spelled:
My hunger will root inside your
blood. I sowed a blade too deep
to weed, but your daughters
will water it. Watch
it grow and watch
their daughters
watch it
grow.
The pit caves, cleaving night the way that
Mother halves a snake fruit shy of rot.
1937
The fish dream in rows, their scales blinking like crushed glass. A fly grovels into the sheen film of one’s eye. This market is full of dead and dying, wearing the balmy daydream of life. You hear a goat meet a blade, its bleat abrupted by a sudden trickle. But you’re watching Ibu. Rousing the yellow back into a fan of browned bananas by squeezing their severed stems. Mid-morning, sun sporing spice from baskets of curled chili claws. You wonder who is hungry, who is full-bellied. Aja ngelirik. Ibu’s starless stare warns you. No one likes when a young girl sees too much. She reflects danger no man wants to claim. But when a body is in purgatory, observation becomes its only defense. Light, crisping the straw piled on thin tin roofs. Underneath, a murder of Dutch soldiers. A neighbor boy no older than you is demonstrating the fragrance of turmeric root.
***
One baby-faced soldier skins it like a bloated finger with his pocket knife. Gnaws on the peel, sneering. He hawks. Spit a broken yolk on dirt. He catches you watching before he catches Ibu. It’s not foreign to you, how she walks with an invisible net, crowding men. You wonder if this is why Bapak takes revenge. The soldier’s hand rests near a pistol cribbed in his leather holster. You stand still, astonished that there exists a place so cold, it turns human lids into snake bellies.
***
Both you and Ibu bow heads. She speaks in native tongue to greet him. When he cocks his head, she performs the stolen language enforced across your village. Pa-gi. You mouth the sound. It feels like a metal sphere turning in your cheek. What he says next, you can only interpret as a trespass. Ibu will never tell you. She will only explain to you what to do when a man skins you with his eyes.
***
Her hand, a slender swan neck, reaches through the mound of fruit in her basket. Pulls out the carton of kretek for Bapak. The soldier takes the tan pack from her, fingers brushing her knuckles. He shakes it, the rolled tobacco crackling like horsewhip inside. You don’t recognize it yet, but this is the look of a man who is pleased with taking something that doesn’t belong to him. Matur nuwun. His accent mocks Ibu. One by one, the soldiers shimmy out a match to strike. Light the kretek in ceremony. Watching the parchment pupae burning, they laugh out Bapak’s smoke. Your neighbor watches. The merchants watch. Everyone understands but you.
1938
Everyone understands but you. The space between Ibu and Bapak is a cindered bridge that remains standing. This house is never still. The land where it stands is tilled with crimson. Though Ibu’s salted fish has gotten rid of the smell, you still see it. Staining the dirt floor like ruby batik as the gas lamp sways. The walls are built from Ibu’s sacrum, but it’s Bapak they wait for in the evenings. How they disguise him. While Ibu and Mbok tear banana leaves, you’re told to steep tea for him and his guest, whose kebaya is green as papaya skin. It is a gift you’ve earned with age–how to beguile ambrosia from dead leaves and pour it for Bapak to drink. You don’t look at him—or the woman beside him—as you shuffle into the sitting room. You know she’s beautiful. As are all the other bees stuck to his honeyed face. Even when he does nothing, it’s the doing of nothing that makes his presence an act of ownership. He asks her if she thinks you’re ready to marry. Dheweke bakal éndah kaya jeng Singah. Ibu’s name falls out of her throat like a felled palm. You’re not sure if beauty is what you want. Bapak has punished Ibu for hers–turning the village over to find anyone who can stand to rival it. The village men, the soldiers, all want to prune her radiance like wild sundung. You find it strange that the same malediction doesn’t befall Bapak. His beauty makes him a master without consequence. A week from now, you will pour a different woman the same liquid amber. But tonight this one will take Ibu’s side of the tikar. Bapak will slide the bamboo partition closed after Ibu touches her forehead to the back of his hand. She will hold you in another room when the walls begin to whine. You will want to ask her why. Swallowed by sleep, the question will deaden on your tongue.
1939
Your tongue deadens at Ibu’s decision. All you know about the man–the cowboy they call him—is that he is an actor. Has been one longer than the twelve years you’ve seasoned beneath blue sky. You first heard about him while playing engklek outside with the other girls. One foot balanced on a square scratched into packed dirt, the other craned behind you. As you leapt away from gossip between mothers, you pictured the man they spoke of. Tall outlaw, an empire under his sandals, though his hands shriveled dry of money, land. His family: half-blooded revolutionaries who angered their king in the land of windmills. A lineage doomed to lost riches. And yet, he was still the reckless froth bubbling between old women’s lips. A man who doesn’t need to rebrick his honor from the rubble. Bapak has shown you how men do not need to build. Their kingdoms are erected by the lips of women around them. And in this world that turns like a struck cheek, it’s why the most broken of men are gods. Now, Ibu confirms the cowboy is your wreckage to mold. Nduwé bojo sing bisa njaga kowe itu penting. Washing rice neither of you will eat, she shows you protection is no different than captivity. You bolt after the day blackens. Only sentinels of teak are left to guard your wilderness. If only your goosed hair could flutter like a million and one beetle wings. You sleep on the jungle’s matted fur, but even she would not have you as a bride. You aren’t yours to give. When Bapak finds you, a sizzling whip lashes against violet like a blanched scar. You return as a wife veiled in bramble. During your brief, childish rebellion, the village performed a ceremony. Bapak and Ibu held your dress up like a shucked husk. The cowboy stood beside it. Without being seen or touched, he claimed you. You are not iron, spine, and flesh. You are not beating with music. You are just waiting to be worn.
1941
He says he won’t wear you until the moon draws first blood. In the mornings, he allows you to chase your friends through mist, stirring whirlpools of pigeons. Their waste, parasols of streaked, white sunflowers on neighboring roofs. Your knees remind him of boterkoek. If he warns you not to scrape them, it makes your friends laugh. You hate them. The girls who don’t believe they will one day be asked to stop playing with you. When the moon begins its slow feast, that is the first sign of dying. A girl will eventually be sipped bloodless into limestone. This scares you. How Gusti will hear your fear–a cricket lost somewhere in a hut. You thrash your body and throw your voice. Nothing stops him from thinking you’re his wife. Every night, Ibu walks from her house to his. She sees you to sleep. You grip her bun while a black mare hooves over your chest. Tenders it. When she leaves, a witch swings upside down by the jendela. Gown cherried like your last milk tooth. He does something to you that you don’t understand. Come morning, no one explains the stranger whose body you wake in.
1942
No one explains the stranger whose body you wake in. Your husband’s crime dilates in you like a pupil cupped. Ibu hopes it is the first boy in her family. You’ve stopped hoping it would abandon you. When Ibu’s milk failed to rise, you suckled Mbok’s breast. Now you suckle her proverbs. Wong tua iku kudu iso kaya banyu. Water, yielding, slipping through. Drowning you in a landscape you didn’t shape. Carves volcanoes all the same. Days smear in apricot bile. From their fallen kingdom, his family sends a one-horse carriage. There is a healer who can make your tiny body obey its waxing colonizer. At first light, husband, wife, and unborn child sit across from each other, tossing through verdant blur like dried rice thrown. Burnt earth, heartless and unfamiliar, under pinched sapphire vein. Sapa sing sampeyan nesoni? You follow his eyes to the empty space pressed against your shoulder. One of his magic tricks is contouring floating dust into specters. You don’t need to explain who you angered, or how you know you won’t give him a son. He trails the cobra winding your neck like a clock without the destination of time.
1943
By fifteen, you are a clock without the destination of time. Sun, crawling towards sloppy strokes of summit behind suppertime rain. Your daughter clings to your left breast as if it’s a planet straying. Squeezing milk like foam from cleaned rice. The veranda of this wind-cracked Dutch manor overlooks deserted servant huts. Clay, wilding in purslane and pigweed. No different than how your womb has begun to starch with absence. Near the hacked trunk of a moringa, worms have tunneled corridors into your placenta. You buried the cord but still see it binding your wrist to her defenseless composition of breath. A new constellation flowers from every cry. You never needed to need anything before this. Death hurries from the cities into the countryside. Over tea, you overhear your husband and his brother rumoring. The Japanese have begun crowding Dutchmen in coops and pribumi are next. Hearing this is the first violence your daughter inherits. In sleep, you hallucinate flayed arms reaching. Awake, she reaches for her father, who at night, squints through the laced shadow of tree wings with a machete. Already, she doesn’t belong to you. You want to risk the impossible. Snap the past’s jaws to keep it from parroting. But how can she be the one to redream your childhood. She doesn’t yet know about the djinn’s blade, germinating in her marrow. The dream–she will walk out of your clutch into the bonfire of prophecy. Her small hand, waving at something in the nothing. The dreams, the dreams, the dreams. Aren’t dreams.
1944
Aren’t dreams archives of light. Aren’t dreams mangled renditions of unswallowed facts. Your perverted caricature lugs a swaddled doll to a lonesome river. Stalks and fronds strand on burnished stones, making gills. The bank, one big fishbone. You aren’t sure if you’re running from or running to, feet absorbing fallen rattan teeth. The doll is laughing. Or maybe screaming. You feel it will burn out like dew as the day gets old. The cliff regurgitates pieces of itself, stacks jagged slabs as if a wind giant is arranging them into cairns. Aren’t dreams destruction. Aren’t dreams introduction. You arrive at the water. Sheer, or maybe so black there seems to be no life underneath. Your face is drawn on the doll’s with crushed cochineal. When you submerge its spongy body beneath, the breath bubbling pops with tangs of persimmon. The act is one you beat your soul against, repeatedly, until a hatch spawns through your dream eyes. Crying, you pull the frozen doll to your chawed nipple. It coughs out its brief oblivion. Years from now, when she is sixteen like you are in this moment, the doll will ask you about this shared reverie. You recalibrate the details. Ngerteni ora? There is no excuse, just the desperation to save the doll from what it can’t understand. You will laugh because it’s the only salve. And when the doll tells the story of her attempted murder, she will pageant it as a jest.
