You are never warned,
just intimated about your
recent folly, aberration,
like you meeting the fog on the day’s drive,
blindsided, startled.
In the middle of the room,
on a dresser, there’s a looking glass.
Through her, you’re swallowed whole
into your past
so full of colour, joy, sadness
all quaffed by shame –
Shame; so lofty,
clinging onto your skin like a helminth.
The pinnacle of your cheek is red,
so are your ears – red, so distinctly separate
from your body
and all of a sudden…
cold and hot alike.
The hairs on your sweater stand up
like as if lightning were to hit the land,
like the earth, your body cracks at its centre,
opens its mouth wide
resigns to its own
abyss.
In your movie there is mitosis,
you split into two identical parts –
one; embarrassed, with stifled tears in
the girls’ bathroom submerged under
the smell of creosote oil.
the other; watching you despise you,
wondering how love for yourself is so
excruciatingly scanty,
riddled with guilt,
next to
nothing.
You spend the next few years learning
love,
through losing love. You say
there is no learning without loss, but
here you are; derelict,
desperate to
find
things that you can lose.
You emerge from the looking glass,
time is like morning dew;
tiny droplets on the Azalea’s chest
beautiful,
and ephemeral alike.
When the dew drips from
the petals, it makes the same
sound
as the drops of water leaking from
one of the many eyes of that
old bathroom faucet
years ago….
split into two;
irreconcilable.
Andal Srivatsan is a writer and poet based in India, and the editor of Pena Lit Mag. Her work has been published in various journals, including TBLM, Verse of Silence, The Chakkar, AThinSliceofAnxiety, BlazeVOX, The Sunflower Collective, Tarshi’s InPlainspeak, MeanPepperVine, and Literary Yard. She can be found on Instagram @andalsrivatsan, where she shares poetry and book reviews.
