Homesickness
It was so joyous that in order to return home each time, I will step out of home again and again.
– Vinod Kumar Shukla
After the sounds of the moving train have sunk
against your thoughts
your eyes retrace the moments
from this departure into the ever-widening past;
you are gathering stones from a sea:
the anxious wash of feet and heads curl
around trolleys of luggage, while the ancient
stammer of the PA system keeps you tied to
where you are; you note that you are one of
many travellers, each with a look pasted on her face,
each preparing to leave or arrive, to be reduced
to the bearings of station; the roads outside
are furnaces of activity; this is night in a city
whose bowels prop up its spine; you go back
to your room, and your clothes, which once were;
the sounds of birds upon first waking;
the peculiar smell on the staircase that you had
to fight to get to work; you dig deeper and deeper
and the lights go out; it’s time to meet the smell
of your excrement, the residue of all you could
hold in place once – the bathroom lights remind
you that you are trundling along in the dark.
Admission
Lodgings unmoved by the curve of winter
hoard tall desires and names
A child glassed by the roadside windowsill
counts clouds and shapes that
dissolve at will, while
the other children are playing games
calling names to those who will
stay put when the streets are dry.
Inside, winter clothes three years old
cannot be tossed aside, they claim
me as I find my poor heart’s way
to shop corners and manicured adults;
more ancient clothes peer out of my closet:
strange tortured worlds, with them,
and bated – as the winds rise and dare
least of all this wake of winter –
demand new lives: my home, quiet cave,
hole, abysmal craving, has turned inside out
with exilic desperation, and yet your home now,
nest, maze of domestic follies, fascist state,
tenement of taught dreams has enlisted
the assistance of winter.
You’ve gladly shared my beehive ululations
pulsated with my damned fixities
your gift, this intouchable persistence – like
the iron clasp of winter, more iron than that,
has cleaved a home out of home, at last.
Hunger
I’m filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul,
There’s no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence.
– Mevlana Rumi
You are warmer than the Mediterranean sun
that melts the glass bowl of my mind
into fiery violet shapes,
Near you, I melt out of my edges
and my wounds grow roots
like in an unheard-of season, near you,
I am full of brine and pregnant blossoms.
Oceans rumble inside you
and threaten to tear you apart,
and I am that shore you must break upon
so that you may ease your heart.
Who engulfs whom?
Like day and night we grow in
and out of each other,
become wombs and mothers
and all the world smells
of this passage.
And when you are away
I peel away the piling crust of time
spot triangular flocks in the sky
and search for an omen
of your arrival.
Until it is Time
A book is not a book until
you dismiss
the etymology of your life in it
A city is not lived in
until you find the path
to its post office
The winter snow falling,
railing against the gravel
is only the midpoint of
the winter’s visibility
Your time will not stop
denouncing you until
you expose yourself
to its vertiginous acid
Not circles of burning
or mobs of afterthought
Not planes of pale recognition
in the fields
Find yourself in a conversation instead
Bury the details, watch the folds
Try not to disappear
until it is time
[untitled]
I hold the poem in my mouth
Like one holds in spit
I let the spit fill up to brim
And then,
As of the idle hunger of a well-fed child
Grown used to the spectacle of food
I let the spit trickle slowly
Down the side of my lips
I let it out slowly
And unyieldingly
Like a miser
From whose talons’ clasp
One must free the bird of money
And then I spit the poem out
I spit at the poem.
Aishwarya Iyer was raised in India and Bahrain, and studied literature at the universities of Mumbai, Jadavpur and Pennsylvania. She has worked as a researcher, teacher, and editor. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as QLRS, Eclectica, Kindle Magazine, Sweet Magazine, Humanities Underground, and on the Tumblr of Berfrois, and she won the 2015 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. She is working on her first manuscript of poetry, The Grasp of Things, and lives in Bangalore.