to my lacewing, with love your red voice sluicing around my elbows, hissing like the moth on a sliced tube -light, knowing how to breathe only in a moon -less dream, tepid breaths, scraping my hollow breast -bone. a lock of hair, mine or yours, in the vial like a scare -crow on my shoulder. the night you kissed me, the amethysts on your lips bruised eyespots, as you poured me a saccharine cup— milk -weed and ginger.
how you left like the cinnamon billowing around a sequinned laugh, we were given two silvers warmed in our closed fists. so was the jerk whose jaw the sun broke on like crushed ice and gooseberries. that’s the part I never seem to get. so what if we were sweetened marbles like a first girlhood kiss? the Light touched us like a father and blew us into women. now, that’s the part I never seem to get.
how i left like light thrusted into purple mouths, acrid petals of piety for bread broken like gold shavings, a womb painted softly— the black -bird’s guilt on embers embossed with my foremothers’ lamp-oil-stained knuckles buckling like a lady of the night curling into a smoked Venus.
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Sarah Aziz is a poet, translator and illustrator based in Kolkata, India. She is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in English Literature at Loreto College, University of Calcutta. In 2021, her translation of Bangladeshi activist and author Pinaki Bhattacharya’s “History of Bengal: from Ancient to British Rule” was published. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Good Life Review and Foglifter Press.
