These Liveries Within
shelves of cells. Should I look at the girl and not see the years of days she was bricked in? You must know that I happen to know that her single unhaired eye a walk of lampposts pictured along a boulevard wherein world was a naïve seashell her hairclip what remained after I tried to pry off grief insisting place and point stashed under the neck of Angelica. Have you kept count of washing her heel under the faucet till the water ran clean and soft and brown tanned in toils of Mozart and mildew her hair still clouds into the sky, her sleeves flourish in a shredded novel prologue. A tungsten thread, that was it.
Concatenation
he said he was eroding into his bedroom wall. he sounded like a palm civet tail when I listened. how self-imposition can sublime sky-larks to creatures hitherto undocumented. he saw an eye as a mirror, a trail of frog legs, a tail about to go. the exponential, I feared, is in the leather mill up the street or the tea shop he used to walk to stomping on every snail. to say nothing of the waiting panicles of newsteafriends. quiescent petals lined radially, the more you walk away, the faster you walk into until the odd boy throws light on the haystack till it stares back. tissues of ekphrastic skies swivelling satellite-born. scattershot pages of a manuscript pushing back against definiteness. idiolects shy away from each other marking exclusionary territories gnawing at a stook of light in a corner where he lay, an unbundled stalk of corn still browning in the centre.
RAHANA K. ISMAIL is a left-hander, a poet, and a doctor from Calicut, Kerala. Her work has been featured in nether Quarterly, Usawa Review, Verse of Silence, EKL Review, the Chakkar, and elsewhere. She can be found at https://www.instagram.com/ra.ha.na.k.ismail/
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