I scooped the seeds,
friction on the hard stone floor
searing the skin of my fingers a little.
The heap in my hand –
the polished pods my grandmother
peeled from leathery and freckled fruit.
A strand of fibre
she pulled right through and
pressed sides of the bean to open cavity.
My teeth tingled as she ran
her fingers through gut of the fruit
to give me those dull and opaque garnets.
(photo from the web)
From the window overlooking the valley
I see her spread-eagled, face downward,
legs folded akimbo and swinging in the air;
bosom like pouches folded between the hills.
She can’t sleep through mornings;
he kisses her heels and pushes her skirt up,
nestles in the dewy haze of light,
watches her vanish into a vapour of orgasm.
She is a slimy wetness at the end of his robe
that he forgets as the day advances and air gets stale.
She soon draws him under ripples of dark blanket
and bares her breasts fresh like blooms of fuchsia.
(Ushas is the goddess of Dawn)
Straddling across the river, the rope bridge like enjambed line
spills on the rock warm with mid noon heat. The space between
two lives wedged with serpents of dreams, coiling uncoiling
slops of messy memories leaving wet traces on the hard ground.
This chasm like the crack on my feet reveals tissues pink, floral –
but lifeless like dry sea anemones smelling of airless space.
I climb and unclimb the steps searching for the world between,
picking fault lines and whispering into silence and darkness.
But I learn that I have to cup my mouth, shout at the face of mountain,
to catch in the echo rebounding voices of the dead, waiting beyond.
(In response to Luisa A. Igloria’s ‘Ghazal, Between the Lines’)
The words have gone missing, only the commas and the long dashes remain, silence scratching like nib on an empty paper. The speech is shorn of accents, and the voice, like inside of an old soup bowl, flat, and moldy too. I have seen on highways deer petrified with fear by my car headlights, courting death. Opal eyes stared at me, mesmerised by annihilation, small ribs forgetting to breathe. In the furrow between ribs soft down got stirred by breeze, a gentle movement as that could affirm life.
(In response to Luisa A. Igloria’s ‘Charmed Life’)
My Garden 