Against Bestiary
By Sreshtha Sen
What an honor it can be to love
you with every creature that is in me.
Each grunt & the soft that will
follow. How I plough, how I fold under
you. Protector & protected. I am a fresh
bodied foal rediscovering this new world.
The first time I held my dinner in my hands
felt a little like this: your lust for me a bleat.
Your figure a feeding. I have never known
an animal more dangerous than man but in
fright or rage, or love—I guess what I
mean: each time we touch, every slither
within me. All wings & fur & snouts stay
gone. I turn only human.
Sreshtha Sen is a poet from Delhi and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review, an online journal for and by south Asian poets. They studied Literatures in English from Delhi University and completed their MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Their work can be found published or forthcoming in Apogee, bitch media, BOAAT, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, The Margins, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She was the 2017-18 readings/workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currently teaches in Las Vegas where she’s finishing her PhD in poetry.