It always starts with some rain and a song
in the background.
Get an urge to vomit stars
and put them all over my head
but it's already too deep down into the sink.
Feet dangle out of a window
so we pretend to walk towards a coffee shop
even though my hair smells a different kind of
ugly.
A dog gets hungry on the way.
An offbeat actress grows tired of her strawberry legs,
so she puts her eyes on a table.
Bored birds brew instants for her.
We carry ball pens for no reason
because none of us can afford
warm hands.
Things happen.
Things that have little to do with us.
I would have loved her a lifetime,
and left her kisses every other Thursday
but it's too easy to write about women
even if it rains metal rods and polka dots.
We barely have umbrellas for each other but
children slap slippers against a murky pavement
and hurry home.
A mountain runs out of its nobody days,
a beast gulps water in the bamboo forest.
Someone writes his name on a chit and passes it
across a room full of friends, who perhaps
know too much,
yet we still pretend to have sparrows
in our back pockets, just because
we no longer run out of things to pretend about.
Sometimes your name gets too long to pronounce,
so I stop halfway there.
It's half past three now. Sleep is coming
like the two hundred and twenty-second page
of a recipe book
and I'm too bad at peach muffins.
Sugar is melting too slowly
on our fur coats.
We've never met before but I'd take my clothes off
and put them in a laundry bag
if you say so.
Then one of us could serve warm rice puddings for breakfast,
and the other could chalk up the right pages.
We'd save leftovers for carnival days
and birthdays.
We'll type them slowly on our keyboards
with weepings of a pocket bird,
knowing exactly why the world is fond of its equations.
We've never met before but
we barely have any complaints against the man
who throws a book in our faces.
He has fishes channelling across his face
and it would be scary
if only we were too bad at recalling
our burgundy benches.
Sometimes your shoulders brush against mine as if saying,
'Bury me in the softest rings of a school bell
and call it a day.'
I will,
if you say so.
- Esha Yadav
English Hons.
Second Year
[Art Curated by Mehak Aggarwal
Edited by Priyambada Kashyap & Mehak Aggarwal]
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