Masculine Sonnet
by Sreshtha Sen
Already this poem is turning  into  what  I  cannot  write:  my  brother
whose fingers would pet me to the kindest sleep. My brother who grew up &
I grew with him      was  there  as  he  turned  12  the  afternoon
he was so bored:   his friends  wanted  some   fun   I must have been fun
he slapped me  as many times as the years he’d spent    learning to be
man.  The hard taste of his knuckles.                I  will  never  forget
my terror plastered on his face—how                  he feared his own
fists the most after that          what they could do         had  done.
I do not want to write about my brother’s hands which I love. I meant
to write about the ones that said I just need you to prove you don’t like men like
that or the drunk hands that squeezed a little too hard after I said stop please
or  the  ones  that  found  my  thighs  in  the  dark  of  a  cab  or  all
the others. I meant to say I grew up   watching my brother’s hands
mold me into a better person. I meant even the gentlest palms have made me
kneel  & heard me       weep &        hated    it but did it anyway.
is a writer from Delhi, India. She studied literatures in English from Delhi University and completed her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Her work has been published in Arkansas International, bitch media, BOAAT,ÌýGlass Poetry, Hyperallergic, Hyphen, The Margins, The Shallow Ends, and elsewhere. She was the 2017-18 Readings/Workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currently lives and teaches in Las Vegas, where she’s completing her PhD in poetry.