Aftermath

Every time she leaves

I break hourglasses / I refuse the gift of regret

When she returns

with her hands empty / and eye bruised / like a child’s knees

I whisper / forget your emptiness

you are the night’s husk /

I have uttered her name / like falling lilies /from a clenched fist / at a gravesite

her name / is the last wishbone / to fill the china of my palm / its madness

echo / I have read like psalms.

She pretends she has not heard

the jacarandas chatter / how I have been livid with love

viscous with blood / a heavy duty wire sparking / in a vicious flood

her heart’s incoherence / is a fist full of flowers

stuffed in the raw mouth of childhood / she refuses the gift of deliverance /

and I am the bruised fruit / of this resistance.

Every morning / she blinds each eye

to love me,

every night / I sleep dreamless

a wolf cut from her howl / I have watched dreams die / ships sinking

in a sea’s wail / a neon stoplight / blinking its last /

on a deserted highway

Yet I am still wild / teeth and hair / dust and bones /

a hurricane’s eye open wide, wild /

so there.

By Karuna Chandrashekar

Biography:

Karuna Chandrashekar is a psychotherapist practising in New Delhi India. Her work has been featured in A Blackbird Sings, The Sunflower Collective and is forthcoming in Eunoia Review and Anomaly Lit.