One Indian Woman.

My mom told me that

The day I was born

Two volcanoes in the Philippines puked lava,

And the sky turned purple

Like the bruises on her back

I smelled like gunpowder, she said

So she named me after the goddess of war

She named me Ballona

I was three when I first made fireballs out of thin air

And thrashed the pressure cooker

On my alcoholic father's head,

Who couldn't stop turning my mother

Into an exhibition of scars and miseries

My mother believed that I was a fire

So she started calling me Hestia

The Greek goddess of fire 

When I was six

My teacher made me stand outside the classroom

Because I spelt fear as fire,

Bend as burn,

woman as a warrior,

Scars as power.

Even sixteen years later,

I still spelt bend as burn, woman as warrior

My hands carry the maps of cities

I have burned and men I have enslaved

I keep their ashes inside my pockets

And they keep my burn marks

On the edges of their shoulders

They told me that love is spelt as a sacrifice 

And Sacrifice as Women,

So I tore their dictionaries,

And gifted them mine.

Every night when the moon sings a lullaby to the stars

They tell their daughters

The stories of the woman who demolished cities and exhaled disasters,

And wore courage on her sleeves,

Every night with each different story

Their daughter wish to be able to breathe fire,

Spell woman as warrior 

And wish that somewhere someone will tell his daughter their stories.