
Photo by Jonathan Self
Poet, novelist, and dancer Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India, to Welsh and Gujarati parents. She is the author of six books of poetry and fiction, and has been honored with an Eric Gregory Award and an All-India Poetry Prize. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods was published by HarperCollins in South Asia, Bloodaxe Books, Ltd. in the United Kingdom, and Copper Canyon Press in the United States. Doshi lives with her husband and dogs on a beach in Tamil Nadu, India.
Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome
In the Via della Scala in Rome,
in one of those apartments
tourists dream of owning,
I walked down a ladder
in my underwear,
with a bottle in one hand
and an apple in the other.
And when I fell,
it was with turbulence,
with knowledge,
that every rib of shame
would smash against the floor,
that ambivalence was primeval.
Later, when we walked
across the Tiber to bring
your son home from school,
we paused to watch birds
in the sky—starlings
in the thousands.
And I could not explain
that it was the beating
of their wings,
the murmurations,
that were a kind of drowning.
That I too would chew
at the bark
of life, if it would
bequeath me fire.
It was November,
the season of death,
and the river moved darkly
between her banks,
the birds flew from sycamore
to sycamore like tapestry,
flood. And every epiphany
that has since arrived
has yielded only in breath,
tempestuous, forbidden breath.
"Considering Motherhood While Falling Off a Ladder in Rome" is from Doshi's third collection of poems, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, published in HarperCollins India (Sept. 2017), Bloodaxe Books Ltd., UK (Jan. 2018), and Copper Canyon Press, USA (Oct. 2018).