Volume 16:1, Winter 2015
Sonnet Issue
Metal Anniversary
A quiet steel river winds its way from our place in the trees
To that Old Town where we slipped bands of gold
On each others fingers
Hand-made in a factory ten thousand miles away
Where once I walked every day on a
Mottled tar road near a rusted Arabian Sea.
Heavy, like iron, you expect the years to sit
But they are light, like dreams of blue copper domes.
Not cold, like steel, on this winters day
But warm, like your mouth, and this well heated apartment.
Nor hard, like titanium, aloof and unchangeable
But soft, like cesium butter, spread on fresh baked bread.
We can be lighter, warmer, softer,
Kinder, better; this day reminds me of that.
Leeya Mehta is the author of the chapbook The Towers of Silence (Aark Arts, 2004). She is Associate Editor-at-Large at Plume Poetry and a guest poetry editor at Origins Journal. Her poems have appeared in the The Beloit Poetry Journal, Fulcrum, District Lit, Poetry London, and The Atlanta Review. Mehta grew up in Mumbai and after travels through the Arctic borderlands and Japan, she lives in Washington DC.