By Anusree P V
i. A SHELLED DAUGHTER
When I mouthed a word for the first time,
I borrowed the warmth in my mother's lips.
What I didn't know is that, warmth is a dichotomous metaphor /
It cradles you lovingly and then eases into
a misspelled benevolence,
an aching wound,
a scarred forgiveness;
until you realize, this is how you create
an unsettlingly identical replica of yourself.
This is how you pat on the back of your head,
without summoning the buried ghosts inside you.
This is how you learn to walk on tessellated paths,
unfettered by transpontine dreams.
The child excavates the shore and the mother yearns for the sea;
both foraging amidst evenly divided ecstasy and misery,
because in the liminal space of cursed cycles-
the rule is: outspread arms turn into flapping wings-
or else it atrophies from disuse.
/ memory is an inheritance /
ii. A HARPOONED LOVER
Once there was a sea inside me;
prismatic salt-piratical treasures-calcite stones /
everything my hands spilled resided there, like strangers in a family.
Over time it turned into gulping floodwaters and
now I am inside the sea; my hands hover around and
I search for the waves of distilled light,
like a maddened bird raging in the thicket.
But all I could find is exhumed filth wrapped in naivete;
for every sea is a treacherous lover,
hymning blasphemy into the most primitive parts of your brain.
And when they ask, if this is what arouses me,
I feign a cadence-masking the shame.
The cavern between relativism and a worn out tongue
is the reliquary of hands you held and the ones you let go off.
So I no longer wonder how beauteous a love would be;
Instead I keep growing hands like an ancient monster /
till I own a pair of hands that doesn't tremble and spill what is served,
a pair of hands that can hold onto and save myself.
/ memory is a migratory bird /
iii. A LOBOTOMISED DREAMER
When I look in the mirror,
all I see is an uninhabitable island-
outlined by shipwrecks ( akin to all the things I'm afraid of ),
within which prostrates a foreign body;
with seer eyeballs-
that grew in a reciprocal evolution,
and a partially paralysed cord, wherein,
the sublimity of a stoic's silence
transmutes into a worshipper's loud prayer.
For fate is a shapeshifter who leaves me longing-
to go back and gamble on my limbic imprinting.
But I'm aware-trying to contain time is a folly-
however gentle you nurture it, or however hard
you clamber onto it, time never decelerates.
But in the midway,
It might allow you to settle into something beautiful.
That is why, in this expanse
when you forget people, they become unnamed lands;
so you can discover them again, from the beginning.
And when you forget yourself, you become an unnamed flower;
so you can love yourself again, from the beginning.
/ memory is what you remember /