Everyone Loves a Dead Girl by Tishani Doshi

They are beautiful, so when they stand beside lampshades or murals, rooms shrink

Everyone Loves a Dead Girl

by Tishani Doshi

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They arrive at parties alone because they are dead
now and there is nothing to fear except for the sun,
except for the rustle of tablecloths, which instigates
a quickening in them, the reminder of a tip-tap
phantom heart. They are beautiful, so when they stand
beside lampshades or murals, rooms shrink, and the air,
previously content to swan around in muddy shorts,
grows disgruntled and heavy. They discuss methods
of dying because even though there can be no repetition
of that experience, something about the myth of the peaceful
bed annoys them. They would like to tell people how naïve
death wishes are. They feel an exhibition of Wounds You Never
Thought Imaginable might help contextualise things. A girl—
call her my own, call her my lovely, stands up and says,
I would like to talk about what it means to suffocate on pillow
feathers, to have your neck held like a cup of wine, all delicate
and beloved, before it is crushed. Another stands, and another,
and even though they have no names and some of them
have satin strips instead of faces, they all have stories
which go on and on—ocean-like, glamorous, until
it is morning and they go wherever it is dead girls go.
In the parties of the real world, people talk about how some
girls walk down the wrong roads and fall down rabbit holes.
People who haven’t put their faces in the soft stomach
of another’s for years, who no longer go out at night
to chase the moon. Even those people who do nothing
but make love in grass all day long. Benevolent people.
Their hearts leap when they hear a story of a dead girl,
and when they tell it to someone (how could they not?)
the telling is a kind of nourishing—all the dormant bits
inside them charge around like Bolshoi dancers re-entering
the world alive, and with wonder. Because how could you not
hold on to your wrists and listen to that that that
unquestionable bloom? How could you not fall apart
with relief ? And when they hold their own girls close,
maybe they tell them how beauty is a distance
they don’t need to travel. Maybe they make braids
of their daughters’ hair, and while doing this, imagine
they could be secured. Truly, they believe themselves when they say,
the world is a forest, darling, remember the bread crumbs,
remember to dig a tunnel home through the rain.

Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Copper Canyon Press, 2017)