My gods have grown stale since you left. How can the saints compare to devas with a thousand arms, a thousand lives, and all this time to waste listening in return for a slice of chilled mango? My saints have always been nameless and unknown, a long line of white-faced men and white-robed women with stories I ought to have learned in school, but I always seemed to miss class for a moth or a bramble or a grazed knee.
Your gods have stories – you painted them across my bed-sheets in the mornings, clicking your bangles and talismans to the beat of beat poetry and monkey tails. Your temple was one piece of carved schist, your idols golden
love letters to the lonely by inthespacebetween, literature
Literature
love letters to the lonely
this is a letter to every single soul
who craves love.
yes, you, with your soft eyes burning,
soft heart yearning,
soft hands reaching & then pulling away.
you, who just wants someone to stay.
you will not be alone forever.
i know that sometimes, the night presses in,
& creeps up your body, covers your skin,
whispers that you're not enough;
how could you ever be?
you go through the day with a smile on your face,
because you don't want anyone to see.
you believe you will feel whole
if you find someone to complete your soul,
yet nobody's offering.
but darling, i think all along you knew—
the one you aren't enough for is you.
or you thin
forgo the door for the open window by inthespacebetween, literature
Literature
forgo the door for the open window
the wind blows more bitter in late december.
all the trees have frozen to the roots, yet still
i talk to the withered bluebells & pray
for a gentle spring.
the cherry blossoms may sting, but some day
i will see their beauty
& not feel their pain.
fog drips out of my mouth & into the air
above the ground. i close my eyes
& imagine a lighthouse. sometimes
the street lights glimmer in the dark,
& i wonder who they will take next.
i remember the monsters from my closet
& under my bed.
deep violet skies smother me until
i can barely breathe, but i'm
not giving up yet.
My mother gave me a flower, said
it would only bloom when my heart
was broken. I thought it was a curse.
I watched it grow, leaf after leaf
unfurling into pink-tinged skies
and lonely nights. My first love
turned me (upside) down.
He tumbled into another’s arms,
and the plant shivered an inch
upwards by morning.
I never watered it, hated it like an
unwelcome guest. I once poured
boiling tea into its roots but
the stem only sighed for a week
and recovered. I met a boy with
a talent for making things grow
and the flower halted its ascent.
We talked across continents and
seasons, telephone lines like
tightropes. I lost my balance.
A
we talk in rivers. I have noticed
them flow in the midst of our
conversations – mine the thames,
serpentine slipping as a whisper
through the low meadows, quiet
and hissing. yours the five rivers
of the punjab, vying like brothers
in a tumult of froth and noise,
wrestling their way through
mangrove roots and mazes.
the rivers raised us, taught us their ways.
somewhere two oceans meet in a
place where there is no wind,
the doldrums silent and still
as two currents cancel out in
a moment of collision. as the
thames flows into the punjab
and halts, so too do we stand
together, silent, over-brimming
with restrained tidal
Mine is a nation of songbirds.
Even now amongst the cliffs of
noise, the walls of peeling engines
and a thousand tongues speaking
in tandem in an edifice of sound,
I hear them still. Blackbirds
dotting the stripped branches of
warped beeches, the flitting of thrushes
amongst the shrubbery of landscaped
office spaces, I hear them trill.
A constant lyric of avian emotion,
their sentiments mixing with mine as
dusk nestles itself in the unlit
corners of London’s neon streets.
I hear them still, as I wander
quiet backstreets in the footsteps of my
Victorian ancestors, wondering if they
heard the same lineage of musicians
weavi
do straight girls do this? discuss how we would die for girls in leather boots and
we’re so loud everyone probably hates us. we lose elections together & i still remember
that time in tamil class when you said that we should go to pride together.
2019, i said, and i meant it like a promise. anyway, sometimes it just gets too much
and you are too much but so am i, so am i. and the fact that i seem to think
this is a good idea just proves that i’m the biggest trainwreck of all.
i can’t look away from you. it’s like staring at the sun. i’ll go blind at this rate.
do straight girls do this? and you confide in me
teeth like rome falling by brokenfragilethings, literature
Literature
teeth like rome falling
lately, i've been dreamin' 'bout shattered teeth
crumbling from my mouth
like crushed honeycomb, sticky blood slow,
just like that honey. sticky blood sweet,
just like that honey.
in my dreams, i can taste the fall of rome,
powerful cities, rich red and royal,
disintegrated on my tongue.
i swallow. smile. teeth no longer teeth but bees,
teeth no longer teeth but buzzing. warm.
i choke and i wake up.
mama says that means death, decay, rot rot rot
( Боже мій, спаси мою дитину )
mama makes the sign of the cross
agai