to tell you the truth,
i don’t know where you are when you close your eyes
you’re naked in mine :: this is the second time we’re meeting
i don’t know what to say to you but latch on
we’re on the red couch and my eyes are closed
i can be in that eerie silence with you, you disappear
i see it so clearly who you are as if we read invisible
lines of story you’re telling but this timeline i’m going
mad i tell you, losing it, we’re familiar with each other
aren’t we, it’s just your body is the shape of a nest
in the forest that grew me, shew me, hello, my cunt
is root, you plant me. do you think we were meant to meet,
i ask, am i too much for a second date, come on, i am a lover
i am kind, i don’t hesitate, you came to meet me didn’t
you hold a knife the other day, to your own face?
incredible, how poets wake every day the way
spear. my throat, i put a palm to your body
is it okay to think of one’s mother when fucking?
your skin, it reminds me. i’ve bathed her too, mothered
to soap, dry, pat, comb, pleat, plait. i’m a poet
child, spinster daughter, prodigal queer, tamil
with flying colours, transient transonance, burning
before they redrew the borders
the temple was in her home district. in the ancestral district,
a temple with a many headed snake, nine?
a virgin who holds three seas in the eyes
of her nipples, my god, what vengeance, what wrath
what fury, trust me, these condensations my readers,
can a globe be a ball a word a child throws when newton dies?
my teacher wants me to take the readers to places
they wouldn’t go on their own. how am i to know,
good rabbi, the prophet is only a map, we all watch
as things happen. dark and fearful places. do conduits
burn like this? i am a fire creature, a burning salamander
burnt orange sand kin, it’s time for me to be a cliché
it’s like this :: poet sits at the kitchen window
on the third floor of a yellow apartment building,
overlooking windows and balconies. poet
is waiting, keeps saying “i am waiting for poet
to come back.” why is poet saying this?
there is no reason to chant these words
this is no insincere poet, but this goes on for years
that it becomes clear to poet that when absent here
poet was present elsewhere.
poet writes on a sunday, every time poet sees
an aeroplane, poet says hi to the poet inside,
safe travels comrade, friend in time, go where you must,
i’ll be at the window, waiting.
______________________________________________________________________
speak, revenge
were we the ones in abandon who shot the earth into a paradigm excuse of nations
no one is talking about the thirst in this existence where outside tightly wound coils
of breath is nothing. one goes in search of a spring and sees a well but the water
can only be sucked out by a straw. who amongst us has a really tall straw?
a nemesis appears in the horizon with the rising sun
there’s a mirage in all eight directions, threatening.
don’t you know in some parts of the world melancholy is not a treatable disorder?
a priest blows out the candle in front of your face, the confessional is burnt to cinder
my aunt doesn’t want to come out of her dead husband’s room and i wonder
if she’s talking to him day-n-night, if he’s sitting in front of her still, if this is the secret
she won’t tell. some people live just to make a point, i’m one of them.
without blowing a balloon of life in my womb and ejecting it out, how do i
tell my purpose? the clock is not a monument, though it seems to me
everyone carries the world on their wrists. my last date claimed everything
at once and there’s only so much one can live in a 40sqm apartment with a loggia
i’m tired of not having rid myself of this fear, i cannot wait to go back to resembling
my mother, pristine piercing, it seems she aches to look into her own eyes
unwavering. it takes a lot of commitment to keep living, i will press my face
out of my womb, bite a zip down to the perineum, salivate lick the wound
to seal and when the mouth is out, suck on my horn of a clit, a straw that was once
just one part of my finger but now, after the fire, is two. almost all of this world
thinks we’ll never learn to quench. people like me, we make our bodies bend.
wait till we speak, revenge.
அவ்ரீனா பிரபலா-ஜாஸ்லின் / avrina prabala-joslin (1992, Tamil Nadu) writes fiction and poetry on places, beings and times. Obsessed with memories that pervade and evade, often of childhood, avrina’s writing is an ebb and flow characteristic of their desire for the sea. avrina’s tamil being, frustrated with the english of avrina’s mouth, now writes on his own as Chella Thambi. His words though are still in avrina’s, as he is too. In addition to winning the Short Fiction / University of Essex International Short Story Prize 2021 judged by writer Irenosen Okojie, avrina’s works have been shortlisted for the Indiana Review Fiction Prize 2021, Radical Art Review Contest 2021, the Berlin Writing Prize 2019 and longlisted for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2021. avrina has read works at/for the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters, Literaturhaus Berlin, the poesie festival Berlin, Performing Arts Festival Berlin, English Theatre Berlin, Lovecrumbs Edinburgh, Present Literary Journal UK, etc. Website: www.avrinajos.net.