Towns of Maybes — Three Poems by Ishu Thathai

Crocodile’s Shadow on Mango Street

I dream.

I dream about a big white house.

I dream about it sitting idly on a dreamy street,

drowsing lazily near the poppy fields:

Big trees,

slinging shoulders on a too-windy street,

heavy-laden with the swaying

iron swing.

A goddess of love,

swinging hazily

from the trees that eclipse

the side wing.

Walls,

as clean as a slate

before it turns haggard

with gibberish words

from learning kids.

Paintings

with no flaring nostrils, only wings.

I dream.

I dream about a simple white house,

sitting loosely

on a winged chariot of a simple dream:

A house that sprouts no weeds—jasmines growing

in the sink.

Walls,

supporting paintings of

Moringa and Saraswati—

no fractured rings.

I dreamt about an ownership—undisguised.

Black or white.

A simple white house

on the mango street

beyond dreams and dearth,

Picking oranges in the goddess’s garb,

celebrating with lemonade and

a fluffy cake of my lover’s making.

The sun slides slowly,

making room for a crocodile in the clouds.

Why is the crocodile casting a shadow over

this elegant dream?

Is there a possibility that I am waking?

There is a dream inside a dream:

a woman lurching inside a poised woman.

Unchanged.

Undisguised in the slick of thick and thin,

like a burn that fails to catch flame anymore.

I saw this woman, and then I saw a house:

a big white house

with constricted chimneys and barely a sweep.

Battered pages in a new leather-bound diary.

Then I dreamt of a different woman

and found a chimney sweep:

Bougainvillea-covered windowsills

and boundaries overstretched but

always lined and trimmed.

Are there more women inside,

rendering this existence redundant?

A woman inside a woman inside boxes of insidious women.

Can I carve a calm woman with tools blunted

by reckless use?

To stand at the equator while the earth burns at its edges.

Is there a possibility?

Or perhaps a fragile probability?

Towns of Maybes

I had revered the towns

of maybes,

until my family built a home

In one.

I had refused to lock the doors

of my ivory home,

until my child crawls through one.

There was nothing wrong

With a town of maybes,

until I took a stroll

with my love.

The world I live in and revel in

doesn’t believe in superstition,

until my mother lives in one.

Love in the Wasteland

What o’clock?

What o’clock?

The watch ticks, and the lover stops,

Raking his brain over rain and rot,

And his eternal train of thought.

Oh, the empty spaces!

Annihilate the places where

The lover’s lover stopped,

The last time the pickle was out of the box.

What month blooms the flowers?

What month lays the bowers?

What love smells of anointed oil?

It’s a wasteland of wasted lovers.

Did you hear the streets stuttering?

Last night, there was a lingering—

A sepulchre of vanished words.

The hyacinth girl had tears of her own,

Falling fluently like shooting stars.

Oh, the empty spaces

And the deafening monotony!

The lover stopped at all o’clock,

But time turns yellow and knocks,

A little wet on the sides,

And nothing smoothly slides.

The corner is empty, but there are

Masquerades for every actor—

An actor in the making, and there is

No face to witness in any sector.

Are you rolling your eyes

At serpentine mouths, while

Curling your lips in foul treachery?

All that you deserted—

Is it now a mirage in the doleful desert?

It’s late o’clock,

It’s late o’clock.

There is an infernal memory,

Whirling in a whirlwind of no remedy,

Choosing the same eyes of deception,

Working our way through digital factories.

It is eternal

And infernal,

Dead is the internal.

All that is piled up in the mountains:

The lover’s desires

And weighty mires,

Rotting in the pit of Dante’s fires,

In the wasteland of wasted tires.

---

About the Poet:

Ishu Thathai is a poet based in India, engaging with the world’s verities one day at a time. Her work explores themes of love, loss, dysfunctional homes, transience, memory, and the philosophical undercurrents of the ordinary. She is pursuing a master's in English literature from Panjab University, Chandigarh.