Endurance
The red army
slogged all the night,
and pervaded the plastic sheath,
enclosing ten slices of fresh milk bread.
teeth leaving scars on
flesh and soul:
Legs and antennae
matched the hunger-beats;
the Formicidae descended
like a dark cloud on the Communion.
lust penetrating each layer of skin,
pain, falsely honeyed by a smoothie tongue.
Three fourths of the colony
assiduously worked their way in.
The powerful mandibles
broke the bread;
defying the restful Sabbath,
the workers gathered baskets of leftovers,
and transported those home. the debris-
an embalmed body,
Monday morning.
An almost deserted banquet:
five or six drunks,
dozed on a slice at the top. negative heliotropic.
Ant-like, you crawled all over the bed; three quarters of the Arabian scent, turned putrid.
After a Telephone Conversation…
the cuckoo in the clock mocks at the stale bread you offered: // ‘Oh, you’ll get over it soon. I know you’ll”// a drop or two of red wine on your smelly linen: soaked and washed, the laundry bakes in the wardrobe. It is cold and dark outside. No dog whimpers. Silence. I redial your number, let my tongue squeeze in the holes on the headset, to thread you a quilt of memories, for overwintering.
Nithya Mariam John is a poet, translator and editor from India. Apart from three short collections of poems titled Ruminations and Reflections : A Pinch of Poetry & Perspectives, Bleats and Roars and Poetry Soup, her scribblings are housed in Indian Literature, The Alipore Post, Borderless, gulmohar quarterly, theravenquothpress (Dreams), latinanthology(Memories on Food), Hyderabad Literature Festival-Khabar, Muse India, The Samyuktha Poetry, Malayalam Literature Survey, Ink-Kochi, Usawa Literary Review, Sanglap and DoubleSpeak, and also forthcoming in Last Leaves. She loves pothos, sugar and milk. But nothing matches her love for books.
The Pine Cone Review 