Grandmother forbade menstruating women

in our family from stepping out after dark.

On the first day, we picked nits and lice,

oiled and combed each other’s hair,

braiding it into dangling ropes. On the second day,

we embroidered hibiscus flowers inside

tight wooden frames. By the third day, we reached

the long end of our patience and silken desire. We knew

ways to open the latch noiselessly and leave

rose teakwood doors to the courtyard open at dusk

to hear the white owl flap its wings into the arc

of time, to inhale the scent of night-blooming jasmine

opening to the stained moon. Let the flickering lamp

die out early. In the sound of anklets closing in,

it was not often that someone arrived smelling of

sandalwood and myrrh. It was not often that we sipped

palm toddy or tasted hemp leaves. Long afterwards,

in the luminous stillness of dawn, the wind circling

nutmeg trees gathered shadows of terracotta

figurines we knew from the textbooks of ancient history

of our burial grounds, curvature of their waists, fullness

of breasts and lips much like ours, in the rippling waters

of moss-grown, abandoned stone well.

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