The Braided Cage
A poem exploring teenage angst in the early 2000s, underscored by a fear of what the future holds.
Esha Malik
Alessandra Sanguinetti, from ‘The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer’ (MACK, 2020)
I feel the ghost of the little girl who once lived here braiding my hair
I feel her pulls but I dare not ask her to stop
She smells more like her father, and I smell more like mother
For my bruises are covered by the scent of oud and hers smell new
Does she know how to dress the wounds from broken glass yet? How to stop the
screeches from ringing?
Has her father taught her how to stitch her mouth up? I remember mother did
little to stop the stinging
A child weaned on violence; my kindness feels like danger
Yet still her heart beats more tender and mine beats blue
She tugs on my hair ever so slightly again; I can’t tell whether she’s excited or
scared
Do I lie and tell her it’ll be okay?
I open my mouth to speak but I’m interrupted by the sound of her tears
The boys at school laughed at her again
They said her nose was too big and chest too small
She told me she came home once and started screaming until she was all she
could hear
I tell her that never ends
She asks if love ever becomes real
I tell her love is a currency, as common as the pennies her father gives her
She then proclaims that she never asked to be a part of this She never wanted to
be tethered to me
She haunts the body of someone who doesn’t deserve her
I open my mouth to speak again but she grabs her hairband and ties my hair
with it
We’re tethered, the strands of my hair form the bars of her cage
Her tears fall out of the sky and create a veil that blocks me out
I stare at myself as I hide in each drop, as the dirt road ahead of me becomes
too wet to drive on
She trapped herself but didn’t think that she was trapping me too
I’m fenced to my post, no longer able to taste the open air
This is what becomes of a girl who wishes for elsewhere
She thought I’d be the one to save her
I tell her this game was one she was born to play
And then I consume her, bones and all
Sealed in her fate
Esha Malik is an English-born Pakistani poet. Born to Pakistani parents in England, Malik’s poetry touches on the difficulties growing up as a South Asian teenage girl from life at home to how this affected her worldview and the societal pressure of womanhood. Her poem “The Braided Cage”, featured in Labaatan magazine’s fourth issue, is her debut. You can find Esha on Twitter & Instagram.
