Two poems by M Sanjeeb Hossain

The burden of unadulterated love

She stands inside

the misty walls of our shower enclosure

her legs spread apart, only slightly tilted 

at the knees 

like Jim Finch’s right angled elbows.

She looks at me accusingly

Pepe, gittu lege geche, she says, after months of no sex.

Can you untangle them for me? she asks expectantly

with a tinge of embarrassment in her eyes 

and shy comfort in her smile. 

A matriarch’s wrinkled bottle-gourds

My grandmother was one helluva woman

Her girls - virulent and destructive,

were low on inhibitions. 

Julia, a public health professional bludgeoning stereotypes, 

receiving calls from men she met at workshops,

curious about pleasing their wives in bed. 

jee, Khaleque bhai, bolen, she would say 

as she rode off to another event on the back of a Honda CM-70,

her legs nicely perched on the side like a barbie.

Dahlia, a recitation artist who laid down her sub-machine gun 

at the end of the war, 

but never gave up on less aware relatives, 

on the importance of a clean toilet and oral hygiene. 

Saleha, a quirky comedian 

who threw her favourite fountain pen 

out of a moving train, on a dare,

just to see the sense of bewilderment in her baby brother’s eyes.

Yet all I remember are my grandmother’s breasts from her advanced years,

like wrinkled bottle-gourds 

still with some life left in them 

longing to be touched

dangling like the pendulum of a grandfather clock,

the ones she’d let her favourite grandchildren play with.

M Sanjeeb Hossain is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Oslo University where he writes about the Rohingya refugee situation in Bangladesh.