January
The price for astonishment
is to be bruised by beauty.
I surrender
before the eyes of a mirror
only to be blinded
by the blue fist of rain.
Outside, the horses nuzzle:
their labored breathing
warm like a glass of milk
offered to an orphan
bent with cough in a dark room.
A love is one moon
and seven suns circling it.
Such ordinariness:
that can bloom
in any darker dialect of quiet.
The hour of hills with their soggy wicks–
The hour of unlearning sky
and witnessing the earth
kill everything.
The bell rings:
let’s light a candle.
Let the light be unfinished.
• • •
New Delhi in Monsoon
Why not twilight?
Why not the many-petaled dream
where I kiss your eyes closed
before burning?
I gave you a name,
names–
noon names, moon names,
flesh names, memory names,
a red name for your eyes,
another blacker for your hoof.
Every shame was a lesson
in love–
a lizard entering
to swallow the pale blue flame
between my lips.
The city I live in
opens again
to the black memory–
only dead board the Metro
to travel up and down
the spine of the city cursed
to misbelove and never die.
Wick me with your water.
Wick me with your blue.
Before you are brought
to the blind rain–
here, here drink my heart-flames
and burn, burn, burn!
• • •
Pragya Vishnoi lives in India and her work has been published in Rattle Magazine and the I-70 Review. This is her second appearance in BoomerLitMag.