Poetry | Srishti Dutta Chowdhury

pc: Brian Michael Barbeito

glass body mine

by bow he will mean listen. listen. when i speak, eyes rest on the measure of brown/stick/clot. all surface is water when downside upturned, face over. terrors are perpetrated easily, inherited fair.

see his face midnight glowing like an eagle, it is the dying. when i move, wind shapes my ears. all masters want a steady surface to bend over & reach between the thighs. later i will want to carry this certain to the table, not an expectation out of place.

by body, i mean a kiss planted squarely on the remorse. certainty is for the floundering, he will say. & between light & the deep, i shall waltz in a whirr squinting at the sore, at the hardkept tonguetied rarity of a spoilt child.

say it is lost

but going on is a fantasy. with one reel, one crucifix, one by one beside, revert to previous settings. squares and one, a tonne of old, piles of exfoliation. in seven years good time, flinch.

the monstrosity of tomorrow, the charity of now. next fall, i decide to congratulate you on the new baby. wasn’t it born, was it postconceived like letters bereft of plain words. niceties. angry scrawls rushing through the lack of line. 

i think of moving, a clear synaptic reversion of  my folds. keep straight. little comfort in getting in, moving out, letting letting letting it fall then hold. wax ears, dry eyes and hands true and significantly weakening. such is the trouble of rotting, roots grow anywhere. in a rut, hair and throat fixated on the singular sound of deception. we are good manure, this is a tangible purpose beyond moving.

do not engage if teeth are out. the wolves come out with the shivers. grow old like a faucet turned out.

howl. for what it is not.

fading

prayers mean nothing to me. empty sound. like a tree, she curved into my spine, a word. hurricane.

it is time. windowpanes give way to the sea calling. one speck hang on a pockmarked pole attached to my radio. where goes the sound after the first contact. skin. little hurricanes of passion. murky like the bloody mary after six. alternatively enabler/saboteur of peace.

at night, i am a whirling dervish to the electric fan. hands reaching head reaching a point. it is the point i drive towards in darkness. this sound reaches no tunnel. an end to this end, time. the stories she writes with her body, the body that leaves through the door.

i have more to say, but in circles. the words armoured against thoughts, keep breathing. exeunt when you think of thinking of nights that burrow into loose earth and dancing.

sleep hurricane sleep

blinded

woman of many heads and ponchos after my appetite own gave me the colour red.                                                                              

and in pastel she became a non sequitur. two houses far bodies growing roots with real living, green between sheets, blue over sink. once a game. twice pulling a trigger over the sea hanging below the tunnel of moons. i am a hunchback conqueror of all internal monologues- you do not cripple me.

dis.arm 

good butter, bad butter

the one you love left you for a stick of butter. so you bid your time rebaking batches of pasty mud for a flavour that won’t right itself. you are five now, five fingers deep in soft gills ceiling high in experiment. and twenty, in the gashes against your poultry. headless body in an unsteady oven. smooth as the herb butter between thighs, alive as glowing coal at the makeshift barbecue. food is what you do now.

soft rolling like lull

amma, when as young as she would be to me, talked of when she was a bride.
‘the houses limit the ocean. run off now. let me stitch’ as she ran her nicked digits over our cares, little wishes. ‘save every nickel for a rainy day. get me some paan.’
our boxes and knick knacks held our stories. old wife, poor soul, young widow, mother to a hundred sons and not one daughter, atulprasad doting paan-maker, i knew you.
letters are always read too late, writ too soon.

a wood door called ‘fancy corner (india)’ by this road i walk down every night. nothing too fancy about the green, old, scrambling for support, colour eaten by rain moss and rust. i lost a cat by the door, i marked it with charcoal in my mind, words in the lost section. ‘at the end of my suffering, there was a door.’ i have been handed ‘an atlas of the difficult world’, now to spot myself on it. this society is desperate from the need of saving from itself. i try i fail. i will recede to polite dismissals too, ‘peace of mind’, ‘an air of civility’, ‘quality life.’ rage died old in a rot bed.
then, what? nothing.