The River of Girls

i.m. India's missing girls This is not really myth or secret. This murmur in the mouth of the mountain where the sound of rain is born. This surging past pilgrim town and village well. This coin-thin vagina and acid stain of bone. This doctor with his rusty tools, this street cleaner, this mother laying down the bloody offerings of birth. This is not the cry of a beginning, or a river buried in the bowels of the earth. This is the sound of ten million girls singing of a time in the universe when they were born with tigers breathing between their thighs; when they set out for battle with all three eyes on fire, their golden breasts held high like weapons to the sky.