[Poem and art by Aakriti Kuntal]

I fell in love

with a different kind of earth

Simmering

Blue and glazed yellow walls

Glimmering second coats

Life

burning

beneath my flicking tongue

I grew a cotton ball in my throat

fields in marrow and suspension in skin

Spanned my stockings and grafted my knuckles

I undertook

   in swift easy strokes

the voids in the air

and swiveled through them

A zebra, a lioness, an albatross and a hummingbird

Humming

Humming

 

I was sixteen,

tender moist bones,

tiptoeing through the corpses of history

and the

spinning frames of time.

I was sixteen

Flat, underground, gaseous existence

I had swallowed only incense

And I swelled

Daisies in my earlobe, in and around

A spiral existence

Inward and outward

Tomatoes in cubes, platters in my succulent breasts

My face, tatters, snow and landscapes

crayons and clay

I thought I could be

Everything