i, lover

for the kind-hearted, i love

[gulabistan]

the summer joy of an orange steadily

grappling at the fibres from the inside

bursting open with a deliriousness

that speaks with the love of ancient soil

nurturing the embryo of an orange seed. yonder,

a leap that grapples with the moon-warmed hands,

waning and appearing. who of you talk of the fogs when

the time is skipping, when the time is slipping, when the

time is stretching, when the time is slowing and easing.

the years of winter always leaf through with eagerness.

a camaraderie between the declarations

settled on tree tops which shake,

singing with splendor and the confronting sky

which rises like a glop of honey swelling

out of a glass jar, scooped in spoon like arms

twisting around a human body.

with age the persistence becomes

illustrious around the streets

where bicycles ring like bells joyfully quacking,

muddling with the sound of wash-steps in puddles.

tremendous quiet, when the sun washes a wild

laugh across the rocks gleaming like ripe fruits.

rumbling sweetness carried, lukewarm in the heart,

like a sun in a grinning mouth, slipping

fingers threading along an uncountable past

[3amoon]

deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet

chapter one

art: nicholas hely hutchinson - spring morning in the garden

[3amoon]

deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet

chapter two

art: julia andreevna petrova - christmas eve

[3amoon]

my head is a kitchen i walk through again and again

to know that the smell of lemon that softly hangs in the air is still permeating the walls slowly, to know that the forgotten butter which sits atop the counter is still melting cheerfully, to know that the edge of my thumb bleeds them same when the grater is too sharp on a tuesday morning, to know that the mint on the window sings back to the birds when twilight blooms, to know that the cream-sandwiches taste just as sugary with each bite, to know the simmer of the water earlier in summers and later in winters, to know that the hollow red pot which oldens and blackens at the bottom each week is as loved as the yellow pan that cooks a sunny-side-up for the children, to know the sliced pears are a testament to love from my grandmother, to know that the warm loaves of bread carefully wrapped in cloth are a remembrance of her own past as much as the present is a remembrance for me.

all i know is all i am - and all i will never know is what makes me into what i am. all that i have picked up in the kitchen clings to me - it's memory and smell, and all that i have touched leaps into my thoughts with the grace of a dancer waiting in silence. memory and remembrance in the kitchen is as lovely as the blue sky after a rainy day, but it is also the storm in the sea when each story becomes stained with the not-quite-knowings until you're past your teens.

when i read "please look after mom" and came across this paragraph -

"How did Mom feel all those years in that old-fashioned kitchen, cooking for our big family? Remember how much we ate? We had two small tables filled with food. Remember how big our rice pot was? And she had to pack all of our lunches, including the side dishes she made with whatever she could get in the countryside.… How did Mom get through it every day? Since Father was the eldest, there was always a relative or two staying with us. I don’t think Mom could have liked being in the kitchen at all.”

You were caught off guard. You had never thought of Mom as separate from the kitchen. Mom was the kitchen and the kitchen was Mom. You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?

- i remembered an incident from long ago again, i read some lines with the goal to etch them in the thoughts where i visited the kitchen often because to me this small part felt like things i could never fully understand on my own - "how did mom get through it every day" "you had never thought of mom as separate from the kitchen. mom was the kitchen and the kitchen was the mom" - were given a voice through which i could pick apart my own circumstances.

being a woman in charge of the house alone, thrust into a dry cracking, and violent city different from a childhood spent in lush greens and slow patters of rain, and thrust into a house different from an entire childhood were all moments i could never fully understand. but i did understand the fear and bitterness that lives in me as a woman as much as it did in her, my aloneness is different from hers but it is as much the same where i am afraid that what i am as a person will become so intertwined with an object i could cherish in the minds of others that on the way separating the two would be hopeless.

if my head is a kitchen i have walked through hundreds of times, reliving memories, tasting the saltiness and smelling the sweetness in small fragments, laying my head on the soft embroidered table-cloth on winter nights, then the kitchen my grandmother walks through is one which is blight with yearfuls of slow worry coursing through the air - a smell fresh with love but stinking with the bitterness of a day gone again.

i was startled when my grandmother had first told me she never loved cooking food and making elaborate dishes for the household - it was an obligation, a rule which she had to comply with, no hesitation. the stories my mama had penned onto my hands - of waiting eagerly for the television to catch the recipes being told by a home-cook or a chef, bouncing through the kitchen to look for ingredients, a bowl of sawayan (vermicelli cooked in warming milk, sugar, cardamom, and various other spices) on one day, a plate of spicy tacos on the next, or a whole pot of namoona (peas cooked to softness in onion, cumin, and other spices) - had landscaped a story in my head that the love my mother held for cooking was born from the love she saw in my grandmother. i vaguely thought of my grandmother's loneliness in the house - of living with children.

when an image is shattered in front of you, then the air which is sucked in the empty space scorches stronger than ever - it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that what i perceived to be a form of love wouldn't be love for all who have taught me that love. for days i had thought that i had misperceived love itself - if what i tasted in my grandmother's food wasn't love then what was it? i learned that some things and some memories, some lingering smells and tastes are in my own hands to define - it was as ordinary as a swing in the wind; that even if i had felt love in the food and even if my grandmother had never made the food with love, they could both be things which would ordinarily co-exist and echo each other. the life i gave to the food is as much of a life that my grandmother had given to her cooking.

sorrow reaches places where love never can, it precedes and floats above love and it is because of that i have realized that though love can be sorrowful, the sorrow can never be verbalized through love - sorrow remains a meandering thought that tickles the narrowest paths on its ways home, but is also in the larger gestures of those who yet remain to return home.

hunger strives to alleviate grief, in its long-holdings, and through filling oneself up more and more and more, one starts to become accustomed to the house that grief and hunger build together - slow hands, slower feet. there is expectancy from grief - coming to life with the light of the day - a belief which comes from years of observance of that which is great. the great becomes the hungering, the hungering steps over the grief - repetitive actions of hand to mouth, hand to heart, hand to stomach, are just familiar actions necessitated to bring relief from the known grief, a mist too large to decipher other than through connections between two organs - skin becomes the outward representation of hunger, the inner organs are the grief which stays within at all times, shut under the skin, under the flesh, under words, under a bridge shaped like a dinner table for three. sorrow is the hunger looking for the spaces love has dug - a house larger than the street itself, a sky smaller than the room in which the grieving live.

[lovlettres-moved]

she went back inside and waited. she saw me coming. her face flickered with, if not exactly joy, the ordinary wellspring of life. i ate a heart. i turned my head.

title from mary ruefle's please read

art by paco pomet

this chapbook ventures through the perspective of ten different birds; the summer, the dream, the loved, the left, the beloved, the fool, the in inverted promise, the slippery heart, the forgotten and the storyteller.

[gulabistan]

old summers, come back

On the delicious mornings of 2008, I tuck my white kurta under my knees and sink onto the crumbly dirt gathering on the balcony. My eyes, half drowsy, are fixed on the fruit tree under our apartment. Sometimes I look out the wall-high window and see the grinning grass take a small peak at the sun and think: “This shyness of love doesn't belong to summers.”

But when nature fixes it's love on itself there's never too much we humans have to say.

(Aren’t we all but  of this same earth too). 

we continue to and braid motia, 

their shape a smell that 

sweetens the wrists.

the child in my eight-year old self still giggles.

oh, and then the years pass 

and this arm of summer wraps 

around me. there’s a lofty smile 

she plays with when the heavy

smell of mud rises in the air

slipping in and out

like the lights of a nearby streetlight. 

am i moving apart from the trees 

or are they getting estranged from me.

a loud wind comes in knocking on our bodies

like it knows us but we never recognize it, 

it's not the wet air or the monsoon air or 

the air that smells like ripened fruits picked 

and set neatly in baskets. 

i take a bite of the air

and it’s as if i am eating a plate of food

right out of the oven. but it's never pleasant

just hot summer air making rounds of the streets.

arms of rain rapidly stomach the soil, eating it 

before the sun-dried winds return to this land. 

every newspaper heads with the line 

"this exclusive summer, the temperature tastes one degree higher

but we keep walking on the burning grass that smiles shy no longer"

the summers are turning inclusive,

fearsomely holding each other closer 

than the year of befores.

it's the summer of 2020 and my

blue-green-child-self returns inside 

of my graying body with a strange knock. 

she asks a question too soon for her: 

              why does the feral song of the trees

not sing tender to me? why does the ferocity

                      of the sparkled river-water and

    lake-water not swim a hope into each day?

                          why did my moon-bird heart

                   wane too soon and rise too early?

in this loneliness she cried: 

the world is you because 

you are one and the world 

is one but we all in our aloneness

feel like every hand connecting 

us to each other has been towel-dried 

and cleaned to the ends of every finger

no mud, no earth, no rain. 

an endless impossibility of connection 

screams out inside a bowl it makes of itself.

at the end of the day, a morning calling in late, 

i look for the briefest moment at the white

shirts hanging on balconies, aside the bright

redness of tomatoes, swaying in the bluing sky. 

something always stays, 

even when it doesn't dare bring 

the blue-green child-self back to me.

(x)

[gulabistan]

chapter four hundred and two

[text under read more]

a poemlet - short on urgency, a repose and a realization.

i am still arranging the love from this morning

i am yet to rearrange what takes me to tomorrow;

a wind or summer sea that simmers like a pot full of love

or the bubbling of water in a soup pot, cranked to the highest heat.

my speech feels like a fisted supper in the stomach

this breath flower opening into a sound

disappearing as soon as it slips

under a childhood blanket dream.

it is a startling sunny; before i forget

i must greet you with my first hello

of the year,

of the coming rain.

of the coming of the world into my hands,

of a smile that holds true even when its fruiting at the edges.

i and your hands return back into the circle we were cut from.

i am stacking our threads atop each other.

today i fit myself into the size of my room

tomorrow i will fit myself into the size of my history

while -

this garden wind would trickle blue -

an opening of the silence of the sun.

a wanderer blows like a wind right

outside my window, a dip in the chin,

flower-like

a white shirted arm flings a centimeter

of distance at me and the beginning

stumbles between numbers.

this poemlet

begins and ends

like it should've been.

as it should've been.

i forget my hellos, when your eyes still

into a stop whenever i enter the room.

in time, i remember all the love

i don't want to let go of: the cat clinging onto my lone shoe;

the tree leaves sweeping over my head like a hand on a mourning head;

the water just a centimeter shy from my toes;

together they ask me to come forward.

four hundred and two hellos

in the end when i sweep my love of you

under the rug and it springs up like a

beginning eager to sing a new song.