Collared shadows with a neat bow in the middle
This is how life began, I remember
thinking to myself as I tucked further
in to the cozy shawl. I saw a dark cave.
Remnants of a castaway lamp shone
against a lightning strike. Then, it
was dark again. As in pitch.
As in an acme of soliloquy.
There were pigeons roosting inside,
instead of chickens. They fed their little
ones, put them to sleep on a coffer
of warm feathers. Spider webs
hid the sun in the morning, shadows
swayed against the rum of the moon.
Here, we go again, she said.
Pigeons’re the bohemians you’re
infatuated with. Chickens were missing.
They’re the followers of rules.
Your hair’s an unlacquered mess.
You prefer serenity. That’s in
your veins. You prefer exhaust fans
to radio or television.
Spider webs’re the torch
pointing to trivialities of life.
It’s easy to get entangled. They’ve shades.
Shadows’re the only ones that exist
for real. Each of them have collars
with a neat bow in the middle,
a picket fence and a bowl of bones.
-
Colors of the deal
He gently removed the coffee scum.
She choked on the mosambi juice pulp.
embrace the milky candor
grab icicles with your naked palm
might just have an afterlife of a mermaid
He buzzed with splintered soliloquies, mapping torpid trails of bugs and moths.
She stared at the quartet of gnats squatting on his fractured hairline.
electrons on heat
He surmised the reaches, wavelengths of lepidoptery.
She chewed on the depths of a Bulgarian ballad.
butterflies, i set you free
weave silken threads on moth hearts
mine, included
Equations of resounding voice (his own) soothed him.
She lilted in the rhythms of a dying symphony.
toothless solitude mocked
He preferred bookshelves the color of cherry.
She eyed a newly stretched canvas at the shop next door.
off white nothingness hung over Kandinsky’s window
stone- carved bees writ names all over limitless hives
Saturday afternoons double- timed as cobweb- removal hours, he mused.
Pietas, unwashed dishes and spider webs scrabbled atop her dock.
chaos, thy name is peace
thy shall always prevail
He said, he’d once painted windows.
Her smile was the color of propriety.
mortal innuendos
portrait of uprightness, Picasso’s current muse
The color of squished ladybug, he nodded.
Shadows mocked at her smudged mascara.
sweat rested in the crease of her elbows
He shook hands.
She lipped the seal.
a foray?
-
Divya Rajan’s work has appeared in Foundling Review, Poetic Chicago anthology, Poetry Friends, Read This, Femina and Asian Cha, as well as others and most recently, Whale Sound. She has won several writing awards and received a Pushcart Prize nomination. Originally from Bombay, she now lives in Chicago, where she co-edits poetry at The Furnace Review.
