Sreshtha Sen | The Sonneteer is Too Brown for This Town

Sreshtha Sen is a poet from Delhi, India and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review, an online journal for and by south asian poets. She studied Literatures in English from Delhi University and completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work can be found or forthcoming in BOAAT, Bitch Media, Breakwater Review, Hyperallergic, The Margins, Meridian, Split Lip Magazine and won an Amy award in 2017. She was the 2017-18 Readings/Workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currently lives and teaches in Las Vegas where she’s the 2018 BMI Phd Fellow in Poetry.

Sreshtha Sen's Website

The Shoreline Review

Also by Sreshtha Sen: For Have I Sinned This is Not a Poem About My Mother The Brunette on TV Says All You Do Is Leave

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Notes on Tense

May 2019

Sreshtha Sen

The Sonneteer is Too Brown for This Town

after Marie Howe It feels / a little like / the moment I couldn’t / pronounce or be pronounced. / Like that / moment before / the laughter, and after / when they laughed and I laughed except / I was the laugh. / Like the moment / I was blamed in name / and renamed because accent / browns this tongue where / consonants are concerned. A little like when / I tried / to learn French. / Early Sundays, I’d leave / lovers in bed / apology and aubade — / to go / conjugate the verb / vouloir: / lusted language / lit up before the sun I want you want we all want Like when we walked home / from the bar here / after everyone became / too much, belted / out our favorite line / from that film about some black and white boat. Mubarakain tumhe ki tum, kisike noor ho gaye¹ — till the men / behind us walked faster / till they cocked / and loaded their voice: armed to speak or stab / or both and we remembered / where we were, trailed off into another’s / language: our tongues sobered / into shelter or survival or both. Somewhat like me — nervous / to dial her across waters. / Fingers trembled to translate / tactics of touch through / telephone wires. / I did my research / googled}dirty talk, rehearsed poorly crafted / pick-up lines (I’d rather go down on you than in history) / me a mimic of sexed up self. / When she answered, fear slanted / my speech / lips failing again I stuttered/ “The State is always watching,” hung / up before the kindest laugh I would ever receive. And then, like / London as I ducked / out to hide / smoke and shame / He followed behind /blank-browed, his breath curled / around my neck till / I felt hoary words and spit: Fag. / Instantly, my fingers froze / into fist, as I willed my legs / to still their shaking / waiting for the inevitable. / And again, he mumbled. / Fag. Fag? Fag. He was only asking for a cigarette. something like that except once and then all the time.

¹ Sarah, hum toh sabse door ho gaye

I write about/as The Sonneteer a lot — she’s this persona who shows up in fragmented and/or reworked sonnets. “The Sonneteer is Too Brown for This Town” was written a little after my recent move to Las Vegas which brought with it, its own strange new experiences that indirectly made me think of other spaces/times/people I’ve felt too much or my tongue (as language/as desire/as resistance) has felt too much. Lately, I’ve been rereading Marie Howe’s poem “Part of Eve’s Discussion” where her similes become the focus of the poem rather than hearkening back to the original moment and I think I tried to do that in this poem to somehow sequence the paranoia and hyperawareness memories force us, us meaning brown queer folks, to take everywhere.

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