~
Stagnations
In some dive bar, you tell me that you cannot separate the art from the artist.
And I? I cannot separate you from the craft inherent in everything,
the brooding velvet canopy of the night sky, the chewed-up,
crescent rind of an orange that is the moon tonight,
the way you wield those marionette strings,
the nylon indentations they leave on my skin.
You smirk Goodbye—the hurtling train of my need
derailed by the sentries in your eyes. On the walk home,
I touch the edges of the wound you created.
It is Diwali tonight, and on Newark Avenue,
the fire hydrants gush and gush in spite of the firecrackers,
some of which do not go off, merely sputter and hiss and falter
so that one is perpetually braced for the blaze of arrival.
A child in a white kurta cries at the sting of an errant spark
until his mother doles out the milky sweetness of a barfi.
The difference between hurt and love is a collapsing bridge.
This entire street, an ablaze cacophony, has always longed for this,
a gush so hot it both births and destructs.
Eventually, all my cigarettes go out and all the children abandon
their toys on the concrete sag of the street. I wander amidst
the rubbish created by celebration, multicolored scraps of paper,
bodies of deflated balloons, black-tipped matches that ended too soon,
the closed shop shutters quiver, and in the distance, you rise
like a tower crafted by a megalomaniac king,
the same stony face on all four sides I gaze
up at the length of you, this body
a ruin bereft with remembrance.
Now, all the silk shawls are folded up,
the purdahs of the evening sway a heavy-lidded gush,
now, the glimmer of ornaments loses their luster,
now, all the vagrant hands of clocks are locked up,
When you arrive, you arrive as the flood.
~
Neha Mulay is an Australian-Indian writer and a current MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Maine Review, and SAND Journal, among other publications. She is the Web Editor for Washington Square Review.