Summer 2024

That summer unbridled a kalbaishakhi on our delta door and three terracottas landslided a quarter of the sky over my bed, soaking with petulance. I gazed above at that biasness of an open eye crackling a threat on our soggy sorrows perimetered by our tribulations while the fronds outside ruffled and wrestled the jargon of electric poles, bird nests, and langurs, driving them away jubilant. As the wailing wind lashed hailstones that turned water on my tropical skin, our home floated in broken pots. But then you entered, a greasy hurricane in hand simmering a purple distraction wide as your silent promise.

This afternoon scuttled in a trail of carpenter ants is bailed by a floating market of cirrus clouds unravelling cities and worries curating murals calico fleeced into songs, carousal, tapestry calling out to my summer window where it unpacks a mane, hooves, withers running into a woman on her haunches stirring a pot mingling with the muzzle still prominent making her more an animal she wants to mount, ride those edges fraying a little her chore disintegrated as they come apart drifting into another tale

A warp of wild grass in our purple kanakambara tangles the hack of garden shears into a weft and woof, wild; for another waft. A dog named Sindoora by the color of her red collar, or her hematite curl on the floor, or her clotted wounds, licks water heaving her last. Our spell of summer dissolves into the night with your resolve to hold us together, longer as you leave behind a string of purple kanakambaram —weightless on my palm.