Rapt Nadira Wallace Comets Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

Rapt

i.

Feet planted on broken membranes of plastic, I look at the flight-lines of the jackdaws and the airplanes bending–– newly trained to a stand-still true, that is the idea of you.

ii.

This is not the first time one person’s weight has climbed me and I’ve felt tempted to show the marks made by your teeth as signature for officials––forgetting business deeply.

Again, that boy with the quiver is to blame & his mother standing behind him in wet clothes––genital-loving goddess, as you’ve been called.

iii.

Hauling my stiff self to the slope of your stomach, as the 8am moon implies precincts where they woo: fairy moods fully healed from the clockwork.

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iv.

What an astoundingly good thing you are––constellation of thoughtfulness beside me on the sidewalk, somehow also a frank body at the counter buying parsley, hair branching the pillow later at night when it pleases the universe––or my Lord ––to let me catch your small, magic floods.

Words can’t bend fate but anyway I will put my vision down, which is: many days lit by the calm that comes of the unashamed grapple to be one, done.

Nadira Wallace

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Comets

The music of these spheres is set, trapped in staves, taut, the silence of spaces.

The women come to define lids, enliven eyes with the soot of dusk, comb scented oil into tresses, weave jasmine, chrysanthemum, but I am deemed too elephant-eyed, shorn of feminine grace, hair an ebony shock paddy field— not one to barter voice for place.

Tongues fork and curl spewing embers of pity, my mother’s face shrinks— a waning moon in the chorus of dissent: comet child, destined for banishment from this constellation of daughters.

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

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