Shivani Mehta Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Shivani Mehta’s prose poems will be sure to stop you in your tracks. Magical and surreal, her block-form poetics weave fairytales with fables, origin myths with domesticity. While all Mehta’s writing is handled in paragraph form, do not call it flash. Do not call it fiction. This is prose poetry, crystalline and unique. In what I’ve previously described as ‘a cocktail of unpredictability stirred with a sharpened sword’, Mehta’s debut collection of prose poems, Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded, was released through Press 53 in 2015, and we’re thrilled to share a sample (some previously published, some appearing here for the first time) of her incredible work.”
— Benjamin Niespodziany
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THE REQUIRED ASSEMBLY
I have eight lovers, one for each day of the week, plus a spare. I keep them in cardboard boxes, holes cut out for windows, feed them a diet high in saturated fat. They’re never hungry for much. They’ve learned to speak in each others’ voices, like a swarm of pollen-soaked bees. I tell them all they’re my favorite, let each one talk uninterrupted when we’re in bed. They say things like, if sorrows were crocuses we could pull them up by the roots, and if wishes were trees we’d all be wandering naked in the forest. I just listen. What do I know, I’m only one ninth of a whole, one crack crisscrossing the white plaster of the ceiling. If we lived at the bottom of the ocean, the water’s surface would be the sky.
EXODUS
When we were exiles my mother wrapped me in paper bags for warmth, carried me on her back as she walked for miles. Our shadows on the ground were one body, everything I saw was framed by her long black hair. Sometimes we stopped in villages for shelter, never stayed for more than a night. We weren’t searching for anything holy, just a place where we could uncurl our fists. My mother told me I was born with the map on my back. I remember how, when we were lost, she used it to orient herself, roughened hands undoing the buttons of my dress, smoothing the cloth from my shoulders, cities and towns asleep under her fingers. Once she said, your spine is the river, each vertebra is a path we could take.
INVENTION OF DREAMS
A woman believes her shoes are wings. Every time she bends to tie her shoelaces, the woman closes her eyes and imagines she’s an angel. She read in some bible or other that in order to achieve weightlessness, you have to empty yourself of every story, conviction, and crumpled napkin. She tries this while her husband is sleeping, turns herself inside out like a pocket. This is how the dream was first invented – a woman suspended six inches above a bed, a man asleep in her shadow.
THE EDUCATION
Everything I know about mourning, I learned from my father. He was a professional mourner like his father before him, knew thirty-three different ways of appearing desolate. Most people only know four. We lived above the mortuary between the butcher shop and the bakery. The corpses never bothered me, they were easy to get along with and didn’t mind the dark. We went to funerals every day, my father was always the best mourner. One of the great benefits of our work – we never had to worry about food. It was always catered, there was usually baked brie, paté on toast points, two different kinds of champagne. My father said his favorite part of a funeral was the women. They always smiled at him as they walked by in their black silk dresses, made him think of sailboats on a summer night gliding on the water.
THIS IS HOW I LEARNED ABOUT REGRET
I was born with a detachable eye. My mother taught me to care for it, to pluck my eye from its socket so I could clean it. Most days after school, my brothers and sisters played with my eye, flicking it back and forth across the kitchen floor like a marble. Sometimes my mother made them give it back. Sometimes I searched for days before I found my eye in a bag of frozen peas, or in the pocket of my sister’s sweater stuck to a half-chewed mint. Afterwards I sat at the kitchen table, polished my eye with a rag dipped in beeswax, the way my mother taught me. Back then only my family knew about my detachable eye but now things are different. Now I date a man who takes long showers. Sometimes I join him, my eye resting in a soap dish on the bathroom vanity. I cling to his wet body, my head on his shoulder, watching my eye watching us, like it belongs to someone else.
ORIGIN STORY
My mother told me I was born from the sky, dropped from somewhere beyond the moon’s shadow. She found me coiled on a crop of weeds, brushed the dirt from my body, shook worms from my hair. My mother told me I came from the sea, washed up on shore with fragments of coral, jellyfish, my body swaddled in seaweed. She heard my cry in the tide’s restless lisp.
My mother told me I was born from the seed of a pistachio nut. She planted it in the garden and waited. Once a day she squeezed my body, testing for ripeness. When I grew to the size of an avocado she plucked me from the branches, peeled the leaves from my skin like an orange. When I tell this to people I say it’s a bedtime story, its safer that way, with no princess, no castle, just a hunchback kissing the lips of a wide-eyed horse until they both run out of breath.
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THE REQUIRED ASSEMBLY was previously published by Midwest Quarterly Review, EXODUS was previously published by Poets and Artists, THIS IS HOW I LEARNED ABOUT REGRET was published in the prose poem anthology, A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly, and ORIGIN STORY was previously published in Hayden’s Ferry Review.
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SHIVANI MEHTA was born in Mumbai and raised in Singapore. She moved to New York to attend Hamilton College and then earned a Juris Doctor from Syracuse University College of Law. Her prose poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Hotel Amerika, Midwest Quarterly Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Her debut collection of prose poetry, Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded, was released through Press53. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, children, dog, two cats, and several fish.
