Cold Cities
There is yellow somewhere,
a pot of jam on a kitchen window
slow deliciousness, wafting
Subtle shifts of the leaves,
tender notices to the skies,
rebelling
in dark lavender
The stench of wood and steel.
Where do you lead yourself?
What do you come to see,
wrenched with a certain headlessness
an unforgivable lance, eyes to the face
and we’re lost forever here.
Someone might find us, you say—will we refuse?
The road turns a corner to where words disappear
The cats mewl louder tonight,
beneath icy fingertips
Tilt your spoon to the outside of your bowl,
it is a comforting axis to spin on.
Small scrapings of desire connote
the lurch of my body to yours
When the moon disappears,
which ink paints the night,
it is your palm that waits
at the end of every sentence
the verse is just unending.
*
Give yourself that time of day
Legs beneath a blanket of rum,
Can you collapse tonight if no one is watching?
The trees are strangely silent
The moths have left the lights on,
Air is sparse, thorny and coarse—
You are invited to not breathe but to soak,
To simmer in the soup of your self
A brokenness, inexplicable
but enough to write about.
Maybe there will be meaning.
*
What sits before me is the emptiness of
a possibility
I hope to be able to hold it
for a second longer
than when my teeth touched your skin
and you flinched—
Warmth is elsewhere,
supine in a crevice
lingering like a shy flame,
an urgent ask, a nightless star—
open, wanting and curdled.
You knit me a whorl of minor things
to say, to do, to be
and I wore it softly for a month
because it cut through the fog.
Will we wait to see what happens,
Time is a broken weave,
a peach in a bowl, bending—
and maybe you will listen with what you have.
Annalisa Mansukhani is a writer, researcher and curator studying the possibilities of the photographic in inter-media practices. As the Programmes Manager for the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in Delhi, she establishes frameworks and activates resources around art and research, spaces of exhibition, critical writing, editorial and public programming. She is partial to fat cats, donuts, and the colour green.
