a little romance with life

I have unconsciously written a series of poems on love - unloving and being unloved loving someone without them loving you back falling in love with someone who is not thinking of you the kind of person you should fall in love with falling in love with someone else and here's another one now. Clearly this woman comes from a lot of experience! wanting to fall in love for three years I have barfed at the L word and apologized to lovers whose holding hands I’ve wanted to puke on i’ve read literature that invalidates romance and fallen deeply in love with the gifts of friendship i’ve deconstructed the L word and said to myself how gendered it is, how limiting, how suffocating i’ve spoken quite fluently about the ills of monogamy the internalization of a romance from movies and fairytales and unapologetically refused to give in but now there is a voice behind my chest a bluebird that had been tucked away, who sings again i cannot decide if her voice...

on my fingertips I can count the number of friends i've had since ten, twelve, nine years, and in between but there's one i can't forget i met Aloneness (A) in school, she was the dark mysterious girl in the backseat who everybody wanted to know but I liked colors and company and cold drinks, A and I only crossed paths she would watch me take friends to the bathroom and back she saw me skip lunch when by myself I would run into her dining at restaurants, she needed no company I thought she must have never skipped a meal we stayed apart, A and I, our worlds were different, too different but in college it got harder to find people to go the bathroom with me they told me I could do it alone – travel from point A to B and B to E those were the days when I saw A again this time an old woman, she looked so free while I missed talks and lectures because my friends were on leave A was there learning about the Mahabharata and existential psycholog...

We are fragile humans with a survival instinct We die without morning coffees and outlive abuse We giggle in terror, laughter is our reaction to fear I have a friend with broken bones who will cycle uphill They’ll peddle and sweat and peddle and sweat Who hurts bad at each beautiful song We are walking jars of shards of glass And warmest cushions for those we love We are the birds who fly with broken wings The fragile humans with a survival instinct poetry is back after months (what felt like years) of silence :')

unfamiliarity with my skin baffles me even today there is a bruise on my toe i just noticed it’s old and healing and dry wild hair sprouts from my belly button it’s long and dark and mad why does the mirror say i’m still the same? the pimples of childhood have somehow vanished there is only aftermath of scratches on my face time has made me thick skinned, some tell me you're fat, you're fat, you're fat, they say imfat-imfat-imfat-imfat-imfat-imfat is that why the photographs say i’ve changed? i once took a mirror to the bathroom an exercise no adult would like to hear i opened my legs and looked right at my vagina my labia, my clitoris, my pubic hair i stared and i stared and i stared why do i not find a woman there?

i couldn't help myself. here is my version of on turning ten by billy collins on turning twenty three the whole idea of it makes me think likes it’s just another day, it’s just another number something like a Monday, any regular day or a Tuesday in the college attending classes a Friday night in comfy pajamas an anxiety-filled Wednesday afternoon a Sunday evening that gets over too soon you tell me it is time to be looking forward, but how do I forget the infatuations that came at sixteen and the complex intersectionality introduced by twenty two. I can crawl back and remember every year at twelve I was an artist I could make faces with only a pencil by concentrating for four hours at a stretch. at seventeen I was a poet, at twenty one a feminist. and now I am mostly at the laptop watching videos and then an article and a reading. back then it never felt so much the people who walked by my house and the illusions of doing good as it does today, all the pretentious...

well aren't you lucky, you fools in love to be so naked in the middle of winter and yet be the warmest of us all

there is something about a duplex which says a house can be one and still be divided everything an effort to be able to reach out who’s story sits in the corner-most room the flickering light that will not be fixed the cobwebs beneath chairs and behind beds who gets the mattress when two sharing a room fight who gets the AC, who gets the pillow, and how there is something about a duplex and the terror of stairs- from underneath the fear of a horror movie, a face staring from between the gap, from the upper floor the coming to life of a family drama you did not want to watch there is something about concrete and two floors that still cannot shield children from the shouts and cries, everything becomes quieter, the voices become clearer; the horror of stairs where you sit listening closely to the swords of words a battlefield, your childhood the collateral damage to a burning family; listening closely to the beating of your own heart there ...