About Me
by and published in Edition Four of Pomegranate
Hi, my name is Nina and I am
interested in being interesting.
About me, well, I believe in
true love.
I think a lot about being extraordinary
and I make really good omelettes.
I’m a brown girl with two birthmarks and
one middle name. I burnt my hands
as a child and for weeks they were
cotton-wrapped and fragile;
every day my parents held my fists in the sea.
Now my fingers are remarkably long
and you can hardly see the burn.
I like pretending to be older, I like
cocktail bars and buzzing black cabs that
wrap me up out of the night and take me away.
I can see cherry trees
from my bedroom window:
in winter, the grey branches wave
and snap back in the wind
and reach up to the sky in barbed wire strips.
Sometimes I am paralysed in my sleep.
Nina Bahadur
Nina Bahadur is seventeen years old. When she is not writing or sleeping, she is procrastinating studying for her A-Levels in Biology, English and Fine Art. In August she will be moving to America to take on the American writing scene from Princeton University. She was awarded Third Prize in the Christopher Tower Poetry Competition 2008.