Wolf Woman Every night, I turn into a wolf’s mistress. On our paws, we pounce together into a meadow. Gorging on rain-stained grass, we howl at those who call us mad. We howl for them. Round & round, we dance in a skirt made of bamboo leaves. How these leaves crackle against our bellies! Leave us as the deep-throated laughter of logwood fire, wings of a black-inked crow, smog in a stone caved den. Into the wind, we shriek our rage like half-stringed cellos. Birds in their bare-nested poverty. Listen, you say. The moon is a girl who sneaks out of her house to rise every night. Sliding into our slippers, we trail behind her footsteps. This is our only way to become ourselves. Our only way to shine.
Regret My spoon puckers at me like a flower- woman’s face. Begging me again to buy her roses. All of them, please. Give them quick, I snap–– wrapping their ripeness in my palm. Bristling against her calf-lithe fingers. How tinkling-ly clean, I lisp to myself before shutting the door. With calluses like oil springing up a fern-thronged pond.
Fall At the farthest end of my vision–– a palm sized maple dangles from an oak tree’s arms. Over & over, it whirls like a ghost lacerating its own back. No: it is not pirouetting to the blaze of a temple bell–– ––it is not bruising itself on the violin- strings of the wind–– it is only learning the lessons assigned to it outside the classroom, in corridors thronged by fallen children.
Hypermetropia Like dust–– the desert sun tears down my glassless eyes. What a day it is! Even these sand-grains look like a peony pollened open on a bride’s bed.
Fortissimo After fighting with me for long, my father storms out of my room. The door shuts with a thud, like stones pelted off the roof. Crows crying in squalor. In the wind of my father’s anger, a leaf sweeps itself to the room’s end. A coir of hair leaps up the floor, crimps into its place. This is how I drop to the bed after fighting with my father. Tearless as a wall, waiting for sleep to shovel me in. At night––his silence bursts into the room like bees from a broken hive. They rise upward, heaving their loss on battered wings. All around me: their rage spills uncontained, homeless.
*****
Photography Credit: Jason Rice (detail)
Trivarna Hariharan is a writer and pianist based in India. She has studied English Literature at Delhi University, and the University of Cambridge. A Pushcart-prize and Orison Anthology nominee – her recent poems have been published in Duende, Entropy, Stirring, Atticus Review, Front Porch, Counterclock, Rogue Agent, The Shore, and others. She has authored two collections of poetry – Letters Never Sent (Writers Workshop Kolkata, 2017) and There Was Once A River Here (Les Editions du Zaporogue, 2018). You can read more of her work at trivarnahariharan.com.
