Sambhavi Dwivedi, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Prayer

when I was younger I slipped
               into bed with You after

                         a bad dream
               I remember that You told me

             to pray

though I never learned how to
                              I was barely human
            You had not given me

my name

I spent the years before my birth
writing to You on the walls of the

                             womb

             carved my portrait into the flesh
so that You would be able to
               find me     

             I often wondered if You were real
or not

      how when we were kids my brother told me    
about his friend who pressed a finger into     
               the corner of his eye     

              it crawling out of its socket like a
slug 

if You were the bad dream I was
                    afraid of

Kabir said

                    God is the breath
inside the breath

           and You

                    in the heat of my mouth

sickness slowly spilling from my stomach
            a confession

साम्भवी                                 (Śāmbhavī)
in English:

             Mother Goddess

                       to exist
                to destroy

who will forgive You?
watch You molder until
You are nothing?

                                         in the dream
                    I remember You

finding the boy’s eye
               feeling it pulse
                    crushing it in my hands

        as if breaking
myself open

                                                       this is my name

Sambhavi Dwivedi on “Prayer“:

I first started writing this poem as an experiment to try to explore my relationship with religion. I come from a Hindu family, and I was given one of the names of God, but even now, when I am asked what it means, I am not always sure what to say. What does it mean to have a name that holds such divine force, to carry that with me for the entirety of my life? I only had a moderately spiritual and religious upbringing, but, like many others, I’m often afraid that there isn’t a God, and I am also afraid that there is. When I had nightmares as a child, my parents would usually tell me to pray to help get rid of the negative thoughts, and I tried to capture that feeling again to use as a skeleton for the poem. When I did pray, it felt as though I could feel someone next to me in my bed, someone who was listening to everything I had to say, though it didn’t scare me as much as I thought it would. It was almost as if they already knew everything about me before I was even aware of my own permanence in the world. More than anything, I had this fascination with the ideas of creation and destruction, what we are before we are born and what we do after. Who is the creator and who is the destructor? How would it feel to be able to hold that kind of power? I am still asking myself all of this, still reaching out for something that I’ll never be able to fully grasp. 

Sambhavi Dwivedi is an MFA candidate in fiction at New York University. Her poetry is featured in The Westchester Review, MudRoom, Parentheses Journal, Door Is A Jar, Crab Apple Literary and the Ocean State Review, and her criticism appears in Words Without Borders. She was a finalist for the 2024 Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest and is a recipient of the Mitchell Adelman Memorial Scholarship for Creative Writing and an honorable mention for the Academy for American Poets’ Enid Dame Memorial Poetry Prize.