Forest Maths
Dawn in graphics:
a brightly cropped cloud takes dew across the length of a waxed May, left undated
like a girl refusing to repeat her skin.
raw light greens me to fed wisdom, stunned by a famished desire.
this much piety to sun, all for my faultless photosynthesis.
nothing is more fertile than this hardship.
I attend the wild reserve of oxygen to exist.
stuck to a cylinder & inhaling of rich aura.
at dusk, for want of grape I did a heartless thing.
life, snapped soon as the smashing of quick thumbs
ending a sapling peeled from the underbrush of dead nails.
blood massing the infinite length of my palms, like the alarming of a red text.
I say this with all aspects of my tear gland, death-eager as a budding poet.
I have seen absence become a metaphor for loss & decay.
time sorts the almighty formula for rot.
I’m elsewhere, happening to you as a puzzle
stalking you through the forest maths of trees & feral surd
like a topic for your distress.
what branch of thought triggers grief?
In the tongue-lolling umami of words, I’m a lad teething in honeyed places.
allow me this branding of dental relish.
we’d have more nights to worry about the sweetness of being veggies.
Leafed Lexicon
at first spill,
her lids tone purpura
in the wild nursery
that is her heirloom of
shoveled calm.
while irrigating, Ma compliments
each stalk with her flowery adjectives well-trimmed.
her zeal, trellising the path to a farmstead.
from this jejune soil,
the crop leaps to her loamy hands
young & bright with pollen stain
and leafed lexicons
none of us are wired to translate
except she. It’s stunning—
what language greets her arrival.
mushroom ovation, fleshy
as the love her palm gifts.
a soft happening.
if her thumbprint grazes any of these stanzas,
it’s wild shrubs clawing near
you’d mistake the worship for war.
Illustration : Prapti Roy