Our mothers worked in soot furnaces late into nights until their skins became reflections of the fire before them.
They patted their blistered hands with lavender oil and honey before the morning began — yet again they would disappear into their small factories like little glowworms in the sun-streaked woods.
Our mothers chopped and cooked pots of curry in the hours between. They tied our hair up in petite buns as their own so they would not fall when we snaked around the banyan tree or tugged at its upturned roots.
They hung smoked lanterns wrapped with black wires against the brick walls.
Our mothers were jeweled in nose pins and brass hoops that weighed down their thinning ears — they glinted in the hot sun like burnt sienna on their ashen skins,
their bangled hands still chalked with white carbon off bundled lilies they wore in their hair on another day.
Anannya Uberoi (she/her) is a full-time software engineer and part-time tea connoisseur based in Madrid. She is poetry editor at The Bookends Review, the winner of the 6th Singapore Poetry Contest and a Best of Net nominee. Her work has appeared in The Birmingham Arts Journal, The Bangalore Review, The Loch Raven Review, and Tipton Poetry Journal.
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