FIVE POEMS BY AAKRITI KUNTAL - PUSHCART POETRY PRIZE NOMINEE SERIES 4

Aakriti Kuntal is a poet and writer from Gurugram, India. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry@Sangam, Selcouth Station, RASPUTIN: A Poetry Thread, Mad Swirl, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Hindu, Madras Courier, Ethos Literary Journal, and Visual Verse among others. She was awarded the Reuel International Prize 2017 for poetry and was a finalist for the RL Poetry Award 2018.  Her poem Lilith was recently nominated for the Best of the Net 2018-2019 by The Pangolin Review. She is also a very good abstract artist in her sketches and paintings or drawings.

Map

I slip between vowels
and hold your breath
in my face. The warm
steam that courses
through my pores and
whistles along the jaw.
When the night sits
as a bat on my chest,
it is in a whimper
that I learn to speak again.
I take your shoulder
and rest my cheek
on it, it flattens into
a sound. A sound
that elopes into the quivering
night. You repeat that everything
will be okay. I know it may not.
I know that illness doesn't
always go away.

But I still need you to say
it, reaffirm to my shrunk, blue
heart that everything will be okay.
In the darkness of the night,
I measure the cusp and length of your face.
After the pills have done their magic
and I can barely open my eyes,
my lids holding the moisture in,
it is in that darkness,
with the body wrung out
and washed ashore,
I think of blindness.
I wonder what it would be
like if I were blind and
how they say the other senses heighten
when something is snatched.
I believe it because in darkness
your face becomes a map,
a map to myself,
and I can remember the scruff of your neck,
and the angle at which your cheekbone
departs from your ear.
I know the terrain of your
open pores and the silky
night sleep of the skin around the temples.
It is through this new darkness
that I will always remember you now,
long after these moments have passed.
I will return to them
when I'm alone and my chest
is beating like a panicking fly
on a windshield.
I would return to them and
slide my cheek once again
against the memory of your face,
softly let the skin talk
in sleek vibrations
of the pain that I cannot explain.

Deluge

Elope into the dark light,
The one that existed before
Anything began.
The night rises into my breast,
A bulb of onion.
It is a knot, it thickens and thickens.
It glistens inside my translucent lungs.
The body is a jellyfish

curling in the wave of time.
There is a flood,
A deluge of light and sea.
I open my mouth and the water enters

every pore of my being. I open my mouth
and the water chokes the veins and arteries.
What do we do at the precipice of death?
Where is life's tangent
moulding?
I cannot seem to grasp at anything.
Everything appears larger than itself
and smaller than reality.
Everything is a delusion that dissolves
in itself.
What do we when the body is sick and bleeding
and the legs turn into logs,
streams furrowing in compartments?
What do we do with this body,
this shelf,
these sick, sick thoughts
bouncing like a ball from one wall to another?
What do we do when death takes the face of life
and one cannot distinguish one from the other?
There is a flood.
Everything is killing everything else.
My eye is bloodshot.
I hold the sea in my arms
and kiss it goodbye.
In the event of no event,
nothing makes sense, only the body flies,
flies like a moth in its great trap,
Slowly dying in the ochre light.

Distraction

I could have sworn
that the tiny buzzing
lights in my right eye
were shards of glass.
They flew, almost levitating
along the crepe rivers
of breeze.
I would count slowly,
as if each number
was a piece of dark chocolate
that I was swallowing.
Then I would imagine
it dissolving along the trachea
or basically anything
to keep my mind off
the rising blood pressure.
Distraction is the key.
You slowly steer yourself
into an imaginary place,
long enough to forget
the reality that imposes itself on you.
This is what I did
when the first cannula
inflated my veins to the size
of a silver planet,
its glossy paper membrane
ready to crash against
the cold air of the hospital room.
I stared at the white lights
on the ceiling. I would stare
and stare until it would
induce a certain kind of blindness
and I would stop feeling
anything. The key is distraction,
I tell my therapist.
There is a swirling trapezoid
in my head and the thoughts
strike each other like
swords on a battlefield.
They are nonsensical, I tell
her. After years of my life
spent pondering the pivot
of existence, the compulsion
to do the right thing, the
expectations from the self,
I feel I have finally cracked it.
Nothing matters. Like they say
'There is no truth, only truths.'
If you think too much,
you become your thoughts
and not the object in concern.
You start living
in a cloud, a cloud spiralling
and swirling inside a loop.
There is never any consensus,
only the citrus pain
of blood vessels tightening
and curdling.
Distraction is the key, I tell
myself. I tell myself.
I must forget
long
enough, long enough
to survive this strange being.

 Contact

I touch the tongue. Seize it.
Hold the reverberations in my palm.
They travel through my wrist and sing.
The entire body shakes
with the ugliness of voice. I take my fingers

Into the gorges of the throat.
The tunnels of the voice box sing

like a wind chime.
I want to reach somewhere.
I want to break it. I want to know the ugliness

of the body. What it is that sizzles beneath the cloak of skin?
At times, I have stared at the mirror

and found myself gripped by a frantic fear. Panic makes my face

blue and my heart oscillates quicker than a galloping horse.
I find myself diseased in this life,
Trapped. I feel the urge to awaken,
to wake from the seemingly endless bleakness of days.
I empty my head into the pillow.
I hold my tongue between fingers.
I write poems. I write poems and sit idly by the balcony.
I hold days between toes.
I watch them slide back and forth into the mud.
I'm intoxicated.
I'm nauseous. There is no sense to this.

There has never been.
At times, I stare at the mirror and beneath my eyes

are cupped boats, dark inflations.
I want to touch my skin and make it disappear.

Bend life, like the spoon in Matrix.
I want to feel the vibration of my heart
like ripples across the skin

and then I want to bleed.
I want to bleed into the most blatant emptiness
and stand on its edge and knock.
I wish to smell it, hold it close, lick it, lick
this ugliness of being.
Perhaps, perhaps then, I will understand it,

I will understand this sickness of living.

Neck

Your head
tilts along a
heap of flesh.
Breath circulates
in the thoracic
cavity and swims
into the gluttonous
pouches of the stomach.

What is decaying
in the pores on
your neck?

Skin slowly rising
into mountains,
prickly, catching
the drift of sun
and heat, eating
organisms,
inhaling dust.

You cannot see
your neck,
you say
its a lobe, a kiss,
between thoughts
and their
reality.
It moulds in and
out of shape,
rolling upward
and downward
as you adjust
your height
and your vision
of the world.

You say
you cannot see
your neck,
but you ponder
if the clavicle
is where the temptation
resides, like a blue sexy
dot on the body's
temperament.

You say
you cannot see
your neck,
but it is funny,
that you have imagined
it as your closest
ally to death.
Round and tight
for the noose,
just waiting
to slip in
and shut.

You say you cannot
see your neck,
not without a mirror
anyway
and then laugh
as the veins,
arctic blue,
thrust forward from
the epidermis
and condense into
a mole,
a tight scar
from dialysis,
and the color
of life
in winter lust.