Bus Stop Blues — Poems by Sreeja Naskar

How can you dilute grief?
I’ve been asking myself questions of sorts
lately. It’s nothing new, except the sun
doesn’t burn bruises and birds don’t
sing elegies for my dead mother.
To live without life is a strange contradiction.
To hope in a godless wasteland is all I’ve
been doing. Most days, you don’t know what
to make of it; so you pleat strands of lies
only to hand them near your windows.
The world outside is a forgotten altar of faith.
Hearts float on the black sea, flesh shrunken,
venules half-torn into a tangled web.
It’s not the mind I fear, it’s the memories,
lovers tangled on the bed under the blue light,
melancholy gripping your slender throat—
it’s him who never set me free.
But there’s fate worse than dying, or the red lines
encircling my left wrist, or the bruise behind
my ear that not even my therapist knows about.
I have lived through and through only to
hear the blackbirds sing elegies, the moon
burning the side of my cheek,
the treachery of homesickness.
I stand where my mother sleeps; the sun
inside me is a fucking wildfire. There’s no
blood redder than the moon that can
give me back all the shades of sorrow.
A blackbird rests on the lowest branch
of an oak tree. Tick, tick, tick.
I wait for another elegy as a flower
springs from my bleeding wrist.

Is there a word for being homesick
for someone you haven’t met?

Words condense on the glass window,
prisms of tenderly folded melancholy
sit on the floorboards, people slide into
the ocean, someone screams apologies.
This rotting life, the one I haven’t run
away from yet, is rotting on the kitchen
counter. Undone dishes lay splattered
in the sink, half-nibbled hearts have
accumulated on the bottom of glass jars.
Hey stranger, your last sticky note says.
I wish I could rush down the station,
take the first train, and run to your house;
knock the door and kiss you through my
tears before you could react.
It’s a terrible thing to love, but a lovely
thing to do all those terrible things out
of love. You graceless stranger—words die
in my throat and form thick knots.
Everyone’s always guilty, throwing words,
breaking others; I wish you were too.
I wish I didn’t wish you anything at all.

We’re all walking into the ocean that holds
no meaning. We snatch memories from the
nibbled flesh and call it loneliness. Most days,
it’s a spiral we like to name grief and let the
wound burn our tissues before the dead words.
They crash against our feet and hug our ankles.
Like Virginia Woolf, we’ll let ourselves drown
despite knowing how to swim, like her,
we’ll die knowing it’s not worth dying.

Before I die, I’d love to take a walk by the shore.

The day would start like any other mundane Monday.
I’ll make myself a warm cup of tea,
reply to the emails from the company I work in,
take the trash bags out, water the plants.
The garden will look just enough,
the flowers so fresh, the sky so blue.
I’ll make a call to my therapist,
cancel today’s appointment,
ditch work, and finish the book.
By twelve, my heart's less heavy, my brain's stretched,
and my skin burned in the sunlight.
I forget the sobs in my throat for a while.
Why can’t every day go like this?
Someone walks by with their dog,
throws a smile at me, asks about my day.
My husband doesn’t reply back to
my text, and I know he’s fucking my sister.
I think of crying, of ripping my heart and
throwing the smithereens away. But I don’t.
After lunch, I hail a cab to Sunset Beach.
The city dissolves through smudged windows,
a blur of green, the sharpened smell of salt.
When I get out of the car,
a torrent of summer breeze slaps my face.
The sky’s so blue, my chest's so light;
the sobs have quieted down,
the screams didn’t make it through
the branches of bubbling rage.

The sea looks so blue, so bleak.
It’s too much, but I don’t mind
the way the waves curl around my ankles.
It smells of sea foam and grass. The hole
in my chest doesn’t cry in hunger,
the sun in the sea doesn’t cry for help,
the madwoman doesn’t scream at me.

I see hearts floating in the ocean, waves
bringing a museum of sorrow at my feet.
A series of half-formed words plunge
into the blue, souls roam around,
the shadow between me and the sea closing in.

It’s black—the sea. I hate how my eyes saw
blue in it. I’m lost in myself, a land of
quietness and suicides by the sea. It’s not sorrow
or solitude, it’s an open conversation that never
happened: the sea and I.

It always starts with a blur,
occasionally a text message of some sort.
“Feed me,” it screams. I laugh.
My room’s the shape of a constricted lung,
devoid of poetry and butterflies.
Some days, it looks like the hollow
below my white matter, a malady.
There’s an ocean between my mind
and my body, one that’s narrow,
butterfly-shaped, the color of dried blood.
I wish it was blue, deep blue, the color
of my eyes; so deep that I won’t ever
be able to swim back to the shore again.

“It’s human,” it screams. I don’t answer.
To be human is the biggest taboo
I’ve heard of. So I burn my skin, break my bones,
rip my hair, and feed on my own marrow.
It feels like home, almost tastes like it—
salty, blackened, exotic.
A list of hellos and goodbyes pile next to my feet.
I wish I could gag on them, choke on them:
a scribble of red crayons, a meshwork of brain matter,
tangled myelinated nerves, and broken synapses.
Is it coming? looms in one corner of the kitchen.

“Come here,” it curls its index finger.
I take the lighter and flick it. Snap.
The red ocean doesn’t look red from this side;
it looks so black, so wide, like an open mouth.
Sadness slices my skin open,
a shade of grey bathes my eyes,
a ladybug crosses the thin lines of the bark.
It doesn’t end like a blur, or a crash,
but grief—one that’s worth living.

My name is Blue.
I don’t know who named me such,
but I’d like to believe it was my sweet
grandmother because she’s always been
fond of making everything blue.
It doesn’t relate to sorrow, no.
I wish it did; that way, I could use references
from rain-washed days and cherry-red eyes
to associate with my horrendous name.
Some days, I think of myself as the book
you never got to buy but dreamed of.
Dappled light liquefies my insides and
pulverizes half-remembered sorrow into
something I can’t name.
Trees stretch and squint at the sky,
fog rises up the car windows,
the city lay sprawled before my eyes,
cold, unmoving, quiet.
Imagine if I were the blue that deposits
in your lungs, something worse than tar,
and make you cry on your birthday.
If I were the real blue that stained
crowded bus stops and empty towns,
my sweet grandmother would’ve never
known that grief was but a dollhouse.

Honey, she’d say, grief is home.
Blue was another color to kill it cold.

Last summer, love began in the whisper
caught between your berry-stained teeth.
We caught fireflies in huge glass jars
and kept them in the bathroom to scare
them away. It was a lame attempt, something
that starving artists in suburbia would do.
Love grew in the flesh of my belly,
scraping its walls cherry red until
screams got choked and tongues got bitten.
I used to be ashamed of my heart more
than of my body. I would lay on my stomach,
apologies sleeping on my spine, my body a
beaten-up pulp of scarred tissues, discolored
fluid swallowing the space beside faith.
Youth ripe orange in the sun, its skin
peeling off, mouth bleeding in lies.
My sister wrote about true love, unnamed
shores, emerald trees.
It wasn’t spring by then.
Smoke clogs in my lungs;
a sleeping lover draws the blinds close;
dying patients curse at a smirking God.

It’s a new year, of sinister smiles
and half-formed sentences.
Noises flood my head, black blurs
my vision; my sister doesn’t sing of love.
My body now dreams of plunging into
the ocean it could never touch, of
slaughtering the green snake Aunt Em pets
and watching its blue eyes roll back.
Love rots in the backseat of the bus,
my stomach tightens, the space beside
faith vanishes into the evening air.
Dirty fluorescent lights soften the edge
we stand at and weep.
Another pile of lies gets trashed out.
I wish I was lying in a pool of black and white,
with my sister sleeping cold beside me.

How does it feel to be so calm at violence?

My mother carries an ache the shape
of a forgotten apology.
It’s huge enough to look like a
giant fucking hole in her chest.
I call it the black hole.
Tear-streaked memories pull apart,
forgiveness dissolves into my mouth,
the words taste so bland that
I almost projectile vomit.
Love is colloquial. Loss is elusive.
A summer holiday two years ago
hits the back of my throat.
My mother weeps into her pillow
while my father’s words slice her skin open.
I don’t know what to do.
There’s nothing but the debt of
responsibilities and the cry of life.
We don’t talk things out;
we sweep them under the rug
that it’s a landfill by now.
My sister serves the meal; swollen
silence stretches across the table,
guilt swimming down my cheeks.
I call it self-sabotage, my therapist
squeezes my right palm.
Anger coils around my body
and tugs my hair out.
My eyes burn, lungs shrink,
bodies lay cold with eyes wide open.
This is how it feels to die.
Blue blurs my vision, I don’t
know if there’s anything that can
save me—us—now.
Words resurface on my boiling skin,
green snakes slither the skin
below my collarbone.
Silence bents enough for the sun
to burn my eyes orange,
and make you forget about yesterday.
My sister stands before the pile
of unwashed dishes in the sink,
unmoving, hesitant.

Memories burn in the hole of
my mother’s chest.
I can’t hear her gasps. Her fingers
graze the back of my hand.
I love you clogs at my throat,
forgiveness spurts over her bleeding nose;
this was not planned in history.
My mother was not supposed to swallow
the sun entire and rip out her skin.

The room dwindled into a graveyard,
the silence grew in my body, and it
hurt everywhere
where youth mottled my skin.