There was no looking glass to step inside myself,
just a small tear in the fluorescent green piling
at the bottom of the concrete stairs: the damp

gullet of a pilot whale, the kind of dark I might
be willing to wear a helmet for. If my mother
and grandmother had called or looked for me,

I’d not heard them. Though my body nested
between cool grit of cement and rug’s weave,
I’d teleported, not to a garden party, but to Amritsar:

watched an elephant heft ten-ton sacks of rice.
Beyond the hums of the house, the dirt beneath it,
the center of the earth asked for its turn.

I’d emerge, sepia-toned, a she-peacock,
spread my hands, lined, as if with charcoal,
as if I’d been in some deep mine. A bird in me

had hatched. They’d ask what I’d seen. A spider,
spinning the spool between her legs, a web
holding her and the righteous sac of offspring.