Yesterday, by Divya Mehrish

Bed, by Robert Rauschenberg (USA) 1955

​Yesterday
                     
It’s a Sunday morning in January just before Groundhog Day and I’m waiting 
for my body to strip itself of this cold shudder; this silence without knowing 
what the sound of my voice tastes like when I go to sleep past midnight.
 
I have a habit of sleeping in the tomorrow and waking up in the today. 
It has been years since I slept in the yesterday.
 
I imagine that when I dream, mouth coats over in sticky honey. I am 
mummified in warm fluid, preserved resting corpse. I wonder how many of us 
die and are reborn in one night; how many of us rest into our graves.
 
My mother sleeps later now in the bed she reigns over, the bed my father 
forfeited after she filed for divorce. I only turn my lights off after the shards 
of yellow peeking out from the corners of her door disperse into the shallow 
 
dust of our hallway. The dark used to terrorize me, the thick velvet of shadowed 
curtains swallowing me. I couldn’t fall asleep without knowing where I was falling. 
 
I have a habit of sleeping in the tomorrow and waking up in the today. 
It has been years since I slept in the yesterday.
 
My mother tells me that I was born nameless. Before branding me, 
she wanted to feel the thump of my dry pulse, watch the way my soft bones 
bent between her fingertips. I only became something after emerging.
 
What is a butterfly before emerging from the chrysalis? Worm wrapped up 
in a pocket of leaves, my brother used to squish warm bodies between his toes. 
What if, before emerging, I was just an ache in a quiet uterus?
 
I have a habit of sleeping in the tomorrow and waking up in the today.
It has been years since I slept in the yesterday.
 
What if my mother’s body had ejected me without warning, like a sliver of poison 
too sweet, too tempting? Perhaps then I would have had a name without first shrieking
into the light of day. Perhaps then I could have been buried with an etching on stone 
 
and my bald head in the earth. Perhaps then I could have been orphaned. I wonder what 
I might be if my mother had wanted to eject me without her body’s permission. 
I wonder what I might have been if I died just as I became life. I wonder how many 
 
mothers eject body from body just because they don’t know how to name a part 
of their body that they don’t know how to know, a part of their body that becomes its own
body just as soon as it emerges from a wounded chrysalis.

Divya Mehrish

Divya Mehrish's work has been longlisted at the National Poetry Competition and commended by the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award as well as the Scholastic Writing Awards. She has been recognized by the Columbia College Chicago’s Young Authors Writing Competition, the Gannon University National High School Poetry Contest, the Arizona State Poetry Society Contest, the New York Browning Society Poetry Contest, and the UK Poetry Society. Her work has been published in PANK, Ricochet Review, Blue Marble Review, Polyphony Lit, Tulane Review, Sienna Solstice, The Rèapparition Journal, The Ephimiliar Journal, Sandcutters, and Amtrak's magazine The National, among others.