Green snakes in green grass — Five Poems by Ajay Kumar

buckle

on the days my head sounds like my father unbuckling

his belt my heart wakes like a failed jailbreak. my mother

is angry at the kitten, less for destroying the just-formed

cucumber, more for leaving them uneaten. i stare

at the bitemark meowed into it and believe all great poems

should have at least a syllable missing. in my mother’s dream

her garden burned overnight. all i did was quote a leaf

and not cite it. how do i apologize except by remembering

the time i soiled myself and let her water me. i still dream

that chapbooks slip through the doors of my school’s library,

pooling there like rubber tapped into coconut shells, waiting

for my grandfather to press them into sheets of desperation.

bruise noise

i remember her eyes closed. a bangled arm

on the sai satcharitra like a bundle of thread

unraveling on water. somebody must’ve turned

the TV on. she always described it to the doctor

in two ways: either as a tree with gnarled roots

or as white noise. the TV bruised black to blue

and turned on her closed eyes. she oared past

the swarm of rippled noise with nothing but

the dots and beached on the landing page

selling tupperware, mixer blenders, and toycars.

in her faith she ties a charadu around my wrist

like a doha. i slit it with a line break

the only difference between song and silence

that night i was a moving finger keeping the score

printed on a torpedo. it sung of an image i’d see later

in the ICU: a stag leaking out of you with crayon antlers

and graphite eyes. after shifting to the room i went out

to get you idli and watermelon juice crossing roads

through a drizzle of pamphlets curled like an umbrella.

if i’m really an artist why can’t i draw blood.

all my first drafts—mixed with varnish, arson,

and structures of feeling—smell like mogras

crushed on bus seats. maybe i’m not an artist

but an orbit in search of a center that cannot hold me

like you do. there must an animal that runs away

from the scent of mogras. i’d like it to invite me

like dignity invites violence. i don’t want to lose

any more. when you haul me up with a poem

what buckles underfoot is gravity and i splatter

on the freehand city and i don’t know what to do

with my hands to make them mean something.

take another look: the only difference between song

and silence is who gets to swallow the words.

permanent collection

i’m always at least almost the same as you.

at most i’m stabbed between the visitors

and the ache like a tusk caught in a sandal tree.

i worried when i saw the headlands of nostalgia

jut into the cracks of sunset before the beads

on the encephalogram of the man dying next

to us turned into ivoried teeth of what i saw.

as if blindness were a bed we couldn’t afford

at the ikea in raidurg, where we got good

photos, ate bad food, drank limitless coffee.

i want to go back to the time when my body

was your thrift store, my words bartered

and bargained at charminar, my love coming

like the toy gongstriker in the salar jung clock:

disappointingly small and brief, applauded

for being over, shrouded with a mocking sigh.

green snakes in green grass

we are lying down on the VC’s lawn

under the flagpole, my head a stray

kurkure on your shoulder, lying as in

lying through your teeth and down

as in we’re gonna gun you down.

we had your white shawl for buffer.

the nation billowed over our heads

and its shadow pillowed our bodies.

on the news we heard what happens

when a country is drunk on country.

i dyed the shawl blue with borrowed sky.

all the flags looked the same as shadows

and all shadows looked the same at night.

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About the Poet:

Ajay Kumar is the author of the chapbook 'balancing acts' (Yavanika Press, 2023). His works have appeared in Rattle, The Bombay Review, SAND, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, among others. He received the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize in 2024 and was twice longlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Award. He lives in Chennai, India. (Website: https://isthisajaykumar.wixsite.com/home)