An autumn afternoon
you're taking too long to cut the apples
uneven, peeling them much below the surface
the sofa offers its hand to rest a head on
outside, the slow drag of the world
steers both towards and away

Of late, it's the yellow in the leaves
marble cooling on bare feet
cycles, slow and quiet on the dust
knocks on my window from a brown eyed bird
the ring of a new text just before sleep
your apple peels piling
red sheathing yellow
skin holding on
to too much of its flesh.

-

There is a pill bug
impressioned in the soil, my shadow
towering over life and its grave.

Many thousand years from now
if we somehow survive this
someone will split a rock into two
and perhaps find this mold
of a life so terribly cluttered in a body
that has now decayed
and will wonder perhaps about this day
how sunny and warm
making us crawl out of our homes,
open in a world that made something so small
hide itself beneath plates of chitin.

Imagine a dozen and more legs
and still being buried close to home.

I am walking well into the night as the day grows heavy behind me,
already a thing of the past.

A tiny heart throbs
silently beneath my soles
as the shape of a pill bug fades
a little more with each step.

-

We are a family of two daughters.
I count us on my fingers
as the winter night turns our feet cold.
Two daughters in a quilt
waiting for the other to sleep
so that they can slyly snatch
each other's share of cotton warmth.
On rare nights
the space between us
is filled with stories of maa
of when she hung posters in her room
of cricketers and bollywood stars
or sneaked her way to the cinema
or laughed
without pause.
The quilt is warm enough for us all
on such honeycomb nights.
I turn my smiling face away
and count us on my fingers
one, two, three.

-

A day before I died

-

A final ode to 2020.
(Caption)

-

Spaces
(Full piece in caption)

-

Long days

-

Let me write you something romantic.

-

Bait.

A net is lying as still in the water
as the fisherman's eyes.
A tiger slows down, ears twitched
as a hunter approaches.
A bear circles around
a honey laden branch.
But the fisherman yawns and breaks the silence
he doesn't know that the last fish was eaten raw
by the same tiger that will now be shot
by the same hunter which will be chased
by the same bear that couldn't get his honey.

If only the bees were trapped in the fishing net.

-

TEXT MESSAGES

I send you a message
and it's not mine anymore
You're in the middle of a market
tomatoes tumbling on streets
voices merging in crests and troughs
hung pink kurtas staining themselves
by the sighs of city buses
feet crunching gravel
gravel crunching old coins
plastic wrappers, movie tickets.
You lower your head to your phone
and the chauraha thins down to noise
your fingers race over the keyboard
and you send me a message
with a familiar feverish crowd;
tumbling full stops, sighing spaces
and jam packed abbreviations.

It is so quiet in here
I can hear the whole city in your fingers.

-