This night has come back like a promise-- not the clouds, but the patterns beneath them oil-dabbed & egg-yolked, homes stacked side by side in a game of chess. We’d make the landscape holy if we could, bless & baptize, let the amber river soak us from ankle to scalp. Where ships come & go & call back again. We take them with their skeletons, wipe salt off each our backs before it dries into a crust. This is a world where everyone survives & if they don’t, at least they allow themselves to leak, membranes porous, diffusing the edge between body & boat. Nothing can wound us but spilling weeds, oversaturated skin, the silk that reached earth before us & what will linger after that. Nothing hurts more than permanence, addicting like the dark. We once believed in a god that would love us so much that he’d leave us alone. But somehow we are still seen, regrettably, in specks of paint, glow that drips & splotches from above. For a home after war is less home than flower: inky petals, silken seeds. We rest our heads in cocoons, let months & footprints gather up in rings; carving new idols from mud & leaves, ash & song, & putting them in corners nobody can see. Sometimes after night we stop speaking, stop sleeping, wanting nothing more than for water to outlast our descendants. & that’s that: we come from myth, a gasp, wide veins run through by lead. We don’t own anything & we wouldn’t want to if we could. A painter died hundreds of years ago & we’re still turning to one another to ask if he had morals, honest hands, if we’re yet allowed to mourn. Leela Srinivasan Leela Srinivasan is an MFA student at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally from the Jersey Shore, she holds a BA in Psychology and MA in Communication from Stanford University, where she wrote and published a collection of psychological poetry as her undergraduate honors thesis. She currently lives in Austin, Texas.
1 Comment
Cyndi MacMillan
8/1/2020 09:45:40 pm
So much to take in. Your piece is overwhelmingly wonderful, and I will have to read this several times. Something about 'Nothing hurts more than permanence, addicting like the dark." resonates. I'd rather sit with that line for a bit. It doesn't want to be rushed. I truly enjoyed this poem.
Reply
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This site uses cookies. Continuing here means you consent. Thank you. Join us: Facebook and Bluesky
April 2025
|