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…

I could have been… soft-puffed lilac confetti heart-shaped leaves of a late spring my fragile blue hems littered in glee to the flapping will of avian wings I could have been … matronly spells of a hilltop sycamore with maple stars hidden all around the crooks of my branches in myth and lore their arrival and leaving unannounced I could have been a deeply wounded thing The muffled pain of thorny prongs the wasted strains of a root’s buried song a dangled fruit rotted to summer’s disdain a life smudged dark and deep into yesterday Instead I’m falling… falling away…

Day 1: Literary Impulse Prompt — Fragmented View

Across an orange sky a school of birds is leaving past the last spurts of the sun and out my pretty window an eclipse softly hobbles in pain into the lap of a tree-fringed street where a lone pup lays licking ripples of idle time A group of friends strays about a park bench their close-hewn silhouettes heedless to where home is Over and about string-cheese whispers of the eve fill the air like a hum of forgotten errands that rouse my dark-haired face from beneath a burnt-paper pile of poems their…

In ruin’s iron feet she passes through realms
her plague-hipbones flanked with sea, wind and flame
a crust of lost lands presses to her womb
spilling blood-seeds light as feathery membrane

Beneath her bulbous lips nimbuses sliver
hymns spit-sigh cacophony of rain
Medusa’s snakes hiss on her sun-temples
facial light refracts in gnashes unrestrained

In the arms of a demigod her lips tremble
her blue-lotus prose in reverence tamed
sloven-breaths stow away the red of chimeras
she maps a new world with firefly exhales

When doubt blooms — her dreams witch-exhumed prayer-palms turn talon, chalices turn poison-blade with Kali’s tongue…

I
hear
you
e d d y i n g
in
whispers
of winds
Your conversations
comb
the shape
of my midnight skin
M i l e s
from
where we started
we
d r i f t
in vain
You flit through me
in a swerve
of dormant action verbs
My arms
o u t s t r e t c h e d
to
your
dust and rain.

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Faces facades honeywax dripping lies The slippery lichen beneath a misshapen smile that points to the altar of temples where worry walks in tightrope lines flailing to the slightest error of muscle Perhaps that is where one gathers truth in remnants of remorse its meaning intentionally lost in the smoke of cigars and star specks but if one could crawl inside these walls of flesh beyond the tender flame glazing this wet-asphalt coolness who knows what you could find and beneath these quiet-mirror eyes would there be a 911 speed-dial and in the place of a pink tongue that distills…

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…