The evening impales on my window littered
in the effluvium of dull, deriding laughter
Derailing a wanton, wounded sky
in whispers warbling a breeze beguiled
by a plume of light gauzed in blimps
of ripe stars meshed with flickering whims
Whilst we stretch
dissolved in the day’s fleeting beauty
Sprawled like an aria’s symphony
Bedimmed sunset beneath our feet
Slaking the thirst of phantasms
to drench in dewy rain
Waiting on wispy dandelions
to bell the air once again.

Shalini is a thirty-something, aspiring writer and poet from the city of Mumbai, India. She’s an in-betweener and romanticist with…

Twilight is the color of rust Much has it survived and known of the dissonance of a new dawn — her dripping, shrilly sheen and blinding hues that bounce off white walls in a cheap simulacrum of batting eyelids when with every passing hour she depletes into a form less venerated Beneath the veiled sanctuary of the sun’s excitable buoyancy she is eventually to be emptied into a mound of soil but she will rise again like new flesh proud and strong even when every crack in the skin of dawn is only rushing to atone what it siphoned off…

To accept this day as a testimony of love Signatures sealed with candy-wrapped lips stamped stiff with the potency of potential in tiny inflections stressing all the wrong syllables slapped thick into the prose of hallmark cards heartbeats strewn mechanically to croon over scentless, petal-perfect flowers A garden plundered in haste the earth around it shaky with the weight of pale murmurs faded into promises steep and when he shows at her doorstep holding carnations by clenched teeth their red linen reducing to a wasted rag she would have been leaning by the balcony her moonfed anxiety dressed in lacy…

It’s 3:00 am and I’m nestled in your arms thinking Haven’t you held me too long, too tight? Atop this sand-filled suitcase we’ve lain glittering with yesterday’s tinsel light our love serrated with touch and disdain With one hand firmly locked in yours breaths languorous in the ebb of prose- one word at a time I’m rolling to the other side of coldness found in silent sheets the language of cinders squandered piece by piece My snow-blinded tongue curtails to a drawl as we tend towards the edges of a fall a horizon shirked away to the bristling arms of…

From out here you look awkward and austere defined by fault lines on a linoleum bed you may sit on for the rest of my life We’re separated threadbare by the event of my surrendering to your sickle-moon arms Placed in them you rock me sternly like a forlorn mother into a symposium of transiting angels and demons whispering lullabies in my ears All day I’ve been running away and here in this lapping motion I find my mind still as Voltaire’s tomb eyes —clear, sistine glass And when slow winds caress my cheeks I think of you — another…

The sky’s a velveteen black
and the moon mingles its milky chalk
without respite
into a bland surface of vanishing ink.
You needle a match into life
within your palms blistered with the sun
Your eyes are torn beacons of a lighthouse
that mirror the changeling tides
careening apparitions
of sailboats on rough seas
and when the spark strikes out
we look on beyond our environs
unraveling silhouettes of the unseen
and something of a serenity
washes over us
like a cosmic intervention
of summer with winter
of an undulating restlessness in stillness
as far out
the vast sea swallows yet another moonbeam.

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Dilly dilly dandelion wishes
Beaming, blooming in the blanks of my throat
Meandering through my mind in well-meaning meshes
Flickering on my lips in flimsy froths

The clamor of these covetings colliding
as they dizzy-dance in delirious pirouettes
To the mere motive of idle-time biding
I wallow in whispers of stealthy silhouettes.

I gather their wisps in calloused coins
to freeze them in the brink of wishing fountains
I fold them in stiff foliage of palms in prayer joined
When to be free of them, lovers and pilgrims move mountains.

But leave them desolate, they coil around me snarling
Heedless of a heady venom breathed, I squander
my love in silvers atop a debris, where darling
you grew me a garden of blue lavenders.

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Do you ever wonder where wafts of steam travel or second-guess how many minutes have passed since you sat blowing into a hot cup of tea and when you carry its tepid surface to take a seventh revolution around a neon sun do you check if the clock’s hands accidentally fell into the speed of light like the wintry morning when you snoozed your alarm to silence pushed a moment or two to tailgate the three dots to slumber Here’s the thing about time — she stands ephemerally split between your eyes her empty and full curves undulating across the…