Newlyweds

In India the housewives kill themselves:
a crop of twenty thousand every year.
Some eat narcotics off their medicine shelves;
some hang themselves. Some, long past feeling fear,
self-immolate. Many are children still,
whose nightmares have become their daily life.
They hope to wake; they dream that if they kill
the nightmare self, they’ll wake as no one’s wife
but as young girls again: innocent feet
escaping from the bedsheets, sleepy eyes
adjusting to the light of dawn, the heat
of India when the sun has yet to rise.

—Cara Valle