This city's neon-crafted eucalyptus branches
are spears in the sparrow's eyes. A walled villa whose mistress can't remember anything other than her own childhood, a highrise-sized fiberglass sunflower adorns its manicured garden, the petals cupping into a plastic-hole for the sparrow to nestle. To be born with a city on my eyelids-- a necessary training to stare at everything through the veil of a hole-ridden thousand rupee bill. Yet, I cannot make up my mind about where to look. The never-ending silence of this city's cacophony: I am learning to memorize the name of each one of its corners without recourse to the explanations in your cheekbones. The unbroken silence of the train piercing through the mountains – you are a sledgehammer inside my spleen that keeps alive this recitation of caveats you yourself found difficult to obey. Do not lean too closely on the lamp-post. I learnt to recognize the safety of illiteracy by putting the hunger's sounds on my open eyelids. The relentless silence of the crows cawing-- behind every misrecognition that guided me towards these graffitis is a desire to peer out into the subterranean constellation that emptiness promises. That the dawn of this city remains hollowed out of birds other than crows, sparrows and common mynahs. The irrestible pull of the clockhand that chisels itself from the blister in between you toes is nothing but a gateway to a palm full of callouses: inescapable. That precise twilight when every bruise ever incurred assumes the shape of alphabets I cannot read. This urge that is safe only on the tip of my tongue is the precursor to this illegible unforgiving – the effort to gather the scattered glass shards through a chronicling of your touch. Against your cupping fingers, the sparrow is dead. It is when you burrow into the hollows of the fiberglass petals to give death a shape, I know the sound of you gasping is also the thud of a city burying itself in a billowing book. On your open palm, the sparrow with its beak slightly open. Otherwise, unhurt: unsullied. An instance of how plastic makes asphyxiation collectible. Your questions are closing in, my ultimate promise: I will always sleep with my door open. A feather-cloud on your lips, and we both know, with or without touching each other, this city is not meant to be housed in second-hand bookstores.
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Nandini DharNandini Dhar is the author of the book Historians of Redundant Moments (Agape Editions, 2017). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Memorious, New South, Best New Poets 2016 and elsewhere. Nandini hails from Kolkata, India, and divides her time between her hometown and Miami, Florida, where she works as an Assistant Professor of English at Florida International University. |