Little bursting words
my mother tongue, the tongue of my mother
the tongue of my father, the tongue of my child
and the tongue of mine.
it's there, on bloody pink, bubbling
toothpaste-coated tips
on violet broken stippled edges
on ridged touchy slippery cavernous domes,
right there.
stripped naked of familiarity,
so doused in anglo-saxon speak, dripping with its oily odour
words ending in pretty, twisted little knots of
american-girl lingo.
mother twirls her kurta-skirts
and says
now you are one of them.
CAPITALIZATION
my love Oh, my love
your boldface letters
curving, firm elegant and sweet
little trumpeting sounds at the beginnings of title-words
(at the risk of sounding too poetic),
remind me of my mother.
and he said I remind him of his
mother,
images of tall curly-brushed women in suits,
bending over boys
burned into my retina.
so much responsibility
and I brushed it off like a ladybug.
I imaged slithery little immature tongues
curving up my lips
and I said no.
Flesh of a tribal
womanly flesh, gentle and sweet
shell-rippled and white as a pink-tinged dawn,
blood trickling up the white forearms,
pearly lashing curves at the arm band.
paraded down the street
amidst a sea of strange men.
she might think
I never asked for this.
but then again who ever did?
marble-esque in her martyrdom
as she takes it in her stride.
not a victim,
but a palimpsest.
all their stories pour through her milk
flow to the soil,
the trees,
flow to the metal of the hard, grey guns
and drown them in cool memory.
Ode to a lost cause (or soul)
I would pray for her if
I believed in God(s).
But I don't so
I won't.
All I can do is hope.
I'm trying so hard to remember
all the little details of her body,
the crevices and curves and flourishes and strokes
that made her up.
Here's the first thing I can remember:
her Gothic arch, caterpillar-thick
kohl eyebrows,
pond eyes and creme brûlée lips.
cheeks like baked-velvet cheesecake-ridden tops,
madly springing hair curling into the small of my back.
Nah-guh-sakee
Nah-guh-sakee-
blue fishbowl eyes stuck in doughy white flesh
stare into my eyes, dead and unmoving
as a deep-sea fish.
From his American Olympus
he tells them to destroy a land
whose name he cannot pronounce.
The curving upward of the tongue, the flat twitch at the guh
and at kee, an expansion of the jaw
he consumes their flesh with his powdered, whale-roofed
hard-set mouth.
The jewels in his crown
burn with atomic flames
and the striped bodies of the men
push against his lungs.
His page-boy sits at his feet
and he tells him,
"Make more."
Roses, plastic and something else
I'm trying not to sound too pretentious
but describing beauty warrants a certain amount of pretension,
I believe.
The roses on my desk make me sad.
sponge-green, galloping, leafy, thorny stalks tumbling out of
and pushing against plastic wraparound paper.
They are not classy,
curling and ringing red,
folding and tapering and expanding,
but not classy.
they're going to wither in a few days,
brown and crinkling grandmother-cardigan pink
drooping crowning olive rot.
Schoolroom poetry is tempting me to digress
into some far-fetched dialogue about fleeting love.
But fear not, this is not the stuff of love letters.
All I'm going to say is
roses aren't all that fun to be around.
I am sorry if that was a little anticlimactic,
but that's the beauty of poetry.
Poems by Anusha Bhagwat