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Aakriti Kuntal participated in my blog a few years ago, and I thought it was time to get Aakriti and her work back on again. What follows are some of her poems from her new chapbook, God, Am I Your Eyelid?, a reading from that book, some art, and links to her work. I find her poetry vivid, attention getting, and attractive in the very best sense of that word. Take a look. And enjoy.
Evening
Evening,
a marble plateau,
sliced breath of the day
Red pomegranate seeds splutter,
turning the mouth’s estranged sky
into a velvet sienna
Stillness—
lack of movement
or lack of thought?
An elongation of emotion
a requiem for the living
The air, it seems,
is suffused with a flat, ochre light,
static around the bark of all trees
A consolation,
a lullaby,
a long, long pause
everything in the goddamn world
bending down
to stare at its very own miracle
Twilight’s veil flutters,
an insect strapped to the day’s chest
She moves,
Slowly, Carefully—
there are no mistakes made here
the day falls in precise moments,
just as it began
A cold shudder
A celestial beast
salivates over life’s porous face
And the horizon grins
Evening,
the sly tongue of light
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Clock
Brine. Soup of muscles.
Some garland ropes the wall of eternity. I am hung at its clock.
Bluebells occur as limbs.
My mouth is a small blessing. It opens
and the air, the air that is the journey of each into each, floods in.
The deluge is the floaters in the eye.
Am I weeping?
Is weeping true only when there is no reason? —
Only sadness, a clause that sticks by itself.
My long body is a cathedral.
Its decomposition is holy.
Men and women meet me in this tiny yard.
Their eyes are buttons, their ears are buttons, they are shirts.
Loose shirts swim beside me.
I am foreign to and most intimate with this knowledge.
The knee is bending for the scalpel.
The body is growing moist and moist.
The climber eats me and I am struck by its holy shape—
a long arc to no end.
The one eye blinks, blinks.
Salt rushes in to save the paper.
I pronounce myself holy in this ordeal of near death.
Hemline
Blood is the hemline that joins jaw to jaw. Each day drops like a bomb and the flying nest of the flesh is witnessed with all five senses. I’m growing a new tongue to hold this tension that encapsulates the flesh today. The flesh splits, a fork, and carves the sky into entities of new shapes. I reinvent the very morphology of skies between my tensed eyelids. I do not know which morning the body will resume its old shadow. For now, it rests like a particle in the sun, heaving, born of trepidations, killing each sense with a new-found one. I imagine touching the naked bone of all items; the preciousness of the curves that make the world might do it. It might be the sacred carpet that with touch imbibes each and every sound that possesses the articles of the cut universe. I imagine that the body’s diameter, spinning inside a helix, will eventually set itself against the sun, and when I peek, I will see the drooping mouth of all creation.
Nocturne One
Small pebble. Tiny chord of a wick. The mouth is an orgasm in black. The night clings to the sore buildings. It leaps into this eye crawling with lashes. Lashes sweep and dust, cuddle and swathe the night. Black skin departs from the wardrobe of phlegm air. I am chewing the insides of a symphony. Small wicks arise in my palm. I count my knuckles. The body is a variable hung in space-time. I’m evaporating between shores. I cling and cling to the paraffin ecstasy of the breeze being withheld by the body. The small chapter of licorice dust soaps the face when the body is half-asleep. Half-asleep, yes, that is how joy meets suffering in this cast of days. Half-asleep, the body rises from its sepsis and catches the worms that make each particle a particle. The anthem is the small tongue clocking along the nerves. Pain is the bedsheet that clasps the ankle, and only the night comes in– sweeps in through the window, an image, a memory of a condition of living. The body inflates as it snores.
Lilith
Lilith,
sepulcher of stunted air
A thin laugh—
the drooping Venus-tongues
ecstatic in the wedges of space
My garden blistered with their warm breath,
their constant heaving
Their inaudible, glaring presence
thousands of purple baby-fists
Hanging, just
hanging
The most precious of sights
yet appalling,
very appalling
Lilith,
your large, viscous being above
these pockets of breasts
You stand
with your tongue deep in my mouth,
a fine straw of divine ache
You stand—still,
deviously devoid of all language,
You stand,
seeking neither forgiveness
nor awaiting any,
You stand outside,
outside breath, sense, being,
You stand,
outside of all human judgement—
plain vicious,
the glorious face of luscious lunacy
Here is a review of God, Am I Your Eyelid?
https://www.outlookindia.com/culture-society/book-review-aakriti-kuntals-god-am-i-your-eyelid-is-a-visceral-incantation-of-illness-and-survival
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For more of Aakriti Kuntal’s artwork, go here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1M64EsuyX9pgvQgUx082Uv9aKAofMdh1j?usp=drive_link
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Five Female Indian Poets
online. Enjoy.