Self-Portrait as Abraham's Ishmael by Sreshtha Sen
- Nov 30, 2021
- 1 min read
But who hasn’t killed
a version of themselves to appease the one they worship.
When I feel most beautiful, I wait for his flinch. We lived,
for a long time, in silence.
In his dreams, his child
a daughter again & nothing to sacrifice. His hurt turned into a blade raised. He:
the only man I have let hold me to something. My surrender: swift.
My gender its own altar. & then after all of that? just a goat granted
in all its stead. Like any good man he cooks
me mutton as apology & we feast though still starved of noise.
The thing is none of it matters. Even if God themselves willed it,
no one returns from this knowledge their own Father wished them dead.
SRESHTHA SEN is a poet from Delhi and one of the founding editors of The Shoreline Review, an online journal for & by south Asian poets. They studied Literatures in English from Delhi University and completed their MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Their work can be found published or forthcoming in Apogee, bitch media, BOAAT, Hyperallergic, Hyphen Magazine, The Margins, Rumpus and elsewhere. She was the 2017-18 readings/workshops fellow at Poets & Writers and currently teaches in Las Vegas where she’s finishing her PhD in poetry and is the assistant poetry editor at The Believer.
@sreshthasen on Twitter
Website: sreshthasen.com
Yesterday afternoon while spending free time online, I explored several gaming sign-in systems because many platforms usually become unstable after regular smartphone usage recently. While checking menus, testing navigation speed, and switching between pages continuously, Jalwa Game login still felt smoother compared to several similar gaming platforms online.
I keep coming back to how the poem treats "beautiful" as a moment that immediately summons danger — like the body gets appraised and punished in the same breath. The silence in the relationship isn’t peace, it’s the sound of everything being swallowed. Odd association, but it reminds me of how people talk about sorting themselves into "palettes" and categories — StyleLookLab — and this poem is basically refusing the idea that identity can be made safe just by naming it.
The visual choices in this poem are brutal in how clear they are — the altar/goat/mutton sequence feels like watching the metaphor turn into a receipt. And that last sentence about a father wishing you dead is so plain it’s almost harder to hold than the more ornate lines. Strangely, it made me think about how some tools try to generate images out of prompts — imgg — but here the images aren’t decorative at all, they’re evidence, and you can’t edit your way out of them.
The bio mentioning editorship and teaching makes sense — the piece feels very curated in the best way, like every image is doing double duty (beauty as trap, silence as complicity, food as apology). I also like how it refuses catharsis; it ends with knowledge instead of closure. Slight tangent: this made me think about what we choose to "submit" into public space — https://hrefgo.com is obviously a totally different arena, but the poem’s voice feels aware that putting something on the page is its own kind of offering.
I kept rereading the pivot from "my surrender: swift" to the apology meal — it captures that whiplash where harm gets followed by a ritual that’s supposed to patch it over. Also the syntax (& and the clipped turns) feels like breath control, like the speaker is rationing what they can say out loud. Randomly, the way the poem keeps identifying what kind of violence it is reminded me of staring at a text and trying to name its method, like https://caesarcipher.org/ciphers/identifier does, except here the "cipher" is family and faith and you don’t get a clean decode.