Sneha Subramanian Kanta
__________________
At the train-station in Birmingham, I’m reliving rhetoric for street-music
though I could be seeing other things for psychoanalysis: the woman with
the garden colored passport, the hospice house with silhouettes in its frame
of incandescent light-bulb windows, or the bonsai seller rubbing his cold hands,
thinking of the thorny shrubs lined in ascending order as a synecdoche for Eden.
Night birds on their prowl must be migratory, wild animals with wings, having
abandoned the shelter of nests. Their singing cuts through a thick ribbon of fog.
The night scatters blackness as weeds sprout in an untended spot as residuals,
as incantations. With a novel about a shipwrecked city in my hand, I realize
the blue stars in a distance give a damn. The night is leaving fingerprints everywhere.
Nani
previously published in Porridge Magazine
I see her sometimes, arising from folds of dark, hair left loose like tresses of cypress trees, holding
an earthen lamp. Eyes lined in straight, neat kohl lines with enough light to illuminate curvature contours of her face. The last time I saw her wear a red saree was when nanawas alive, but in flashes like these, I only see a silhouette of her face. I have yearned to meet a goddess after my mother’s
death & have come to learn of grief as strength. Her face, pristine as morning sun reflects memory
at night—the night she doesn’t come to visit becomes amavasya. If night is an elegy with melancholic sounds, then dawn is the numb hour when psalms from her marooned breath find way into my eardrums. If all light is god & god rises with the sun, she turns day into night & rises with the moon. The smell of an ocean lingers on her body. I see her without the grief I last saw on her face, after losing a daughter & being caged. I want to ask if she traveled back to Karachi to look at her
ancestral house abandoned during partition & if all light is the shape of god. She leaves by turning into the shape of a diamond, gliding like a bird through gleams of space in the blue cirrocumulus.
Thunderstorm
previously published in Longleaf Review
Tonight, we inhale combustion
quilted with orange residues
that leak from solitary bulbs.
In Paris long enough, I befriend
curled tresses of the cul de sac
on the road below my lodging.
This is how spring stings us –
This is how we get used to cold
as old buildings attract mist.
I cannot catalogue much except
progeny of wild winds that roar
on the neck of a windowpane.
When it rains in Paris, it bleeds
into swift little gutters.
You can see your reflection
over its mercury embryo.
Three Ways to Open to Life
previously published in Longleaf Review
& if mortality is wet-sand clawing
to your rubber-sandals
the body heating in thaw
would you rummage through peculiar chores:
fold laundry, make the bed, scratch the calendar,
& sharpen pencils
self-portrait as didn’t-stop-to-smell-the-flowers?
& if you were the places you imagine yourself
on cold nights; roads with solitary streetlamps
& darkening wind-combed grasses
bitter frost scratching surfaces
of weary walls
as if earthquakes & weathering weren’t enough
would you trust your name
in the mouth of another?
& if you were an urn
flowers on the exterior
& ash held within
would you utter hallelujahs in silence?
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee, and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. Her chapbook titled Home is Hyperbole won the Boston Uncommon Chapbook Series (Boston Accent Lit). She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal. An old soul, she runs a patisserie.