a mother’s sermon

since last spring        I taste pollen in my throat             & the face of a newborn
flashes over my eyesight before he runs away prancing deer-like
every night after sunflowers wilt the hour of rose-ringed parakeets begins

they have made cribs out of barbed electric wires above houses speckled
all over town the ocean has chained my spine in its rustling pull
I scrape rainwater out of the faces of circular green leaves at dawn

superclusters of stars burn one last time hazily & the ocean spits salt
the ether splits into faint crimson- jade sews the land with bottle green leafed trees
orioles & hummingbirds & crows jays & bluebirds commence birdsongs

my throat a lutite slope discrepant as the Pacific underwater my breasts a milk white
river flows into the umbilicus the unborn feels like a bunch of lilies knotted
within the womb fragile & untamed against the push of winds

centuries ago this ocean heaved in blood-waves thaw has leveled
waters I borrow silence say I am woman let pre-dawn engulf a metamorphosis
I make a shrine of my body so they keep you holy & unharmed.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Biography:

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee, and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. Her chapbook titled ‘Home is Hyperbole’ won the Boston Uncommon Chapbook Series (Boston Accent Lit). She is the author of Synecdoche (The Poetry Annals) and Prosopopoeia (Ghost City Press).  She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal. An old soul, she runs a patisserie.