Green snakes in green grass — Five Poems by Ajay Kumar

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.

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

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.

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.

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.