In love’s country
In love’s country
Desire is an over-ripe mango
Yellow, fragrant, enticing from the outside
Pulpy, fibrous, and pungent from the inside
The longer you keep, the sooner it perishes
In love’s country
Sadness is a lone mango tree
Resting underneath its gigantic canopy
Rooted in permanence
Heavy from seasonal blights
In love’s country
Longing is a raw mango
Pickled, bottled, preserved
That tears open glands
When served in daily doses of the past.
Chapter
I love footnotes in long chapters
They help me follow along
Concepts that need context
Theories irrational
Stories unbelievable
Anecdotes that speak a foreign language
They’re too easy to miss
And make things difficult, if not found
They’re designed that way
They don’t interrupt, but
Lead us to a moral
They’re disguised
In signs we ignore
Between lines we read
In paragraphs we skip
In things we follow
In voices we hush
Some call them intuition too
Layers
Rolls of white
Cotton fibers, delicate as hurt
Circle by circle; layer by layer
Ease grip on me
Tincture–its pleasing aroma
Bone, gathering its own pieces
A jigsaw puzzle, almost complete
Nothing much the physicians could do
Allow it to heal, let it take its form
Take its own time
No signs of pain yet
It’s fragile from years of carrying
Calcium deficiency has made it brittle
The deficiency is real…
That’s the thing with deficiencies
You don’t know they exist
Until, they show up in
Places you didn't know existed
Alive
One of my self-discovery trips
Stuff women do in their forties
When loss seems like
a habit we cannot live without
I, in my hermit kingdom
a crab trapped in the recess of a large coral reef
From my window, I see a murky creek,
Exhausted and weak
She slithers like an eel along a cleared rainforest patch
The ocean decides her form
High tides swell her up
Low tides expose her innards
From fleshy to skeletal, she transforms on a whim
Change is often painful, she does that with ease
On a clear, full-moon night, I step beside her
And listen as she huffs and puffs
Bubbles arise and fill up the moon in her
Like she’s breathing life into it
And then I knew, she was alive.
Sheena is a poet based out of Bangalore. Sheena’s debut book named Defiance Came Naturally to Me was published by RedRiver in 2021. She works as a content designer and is fascinated by the power of the human psyche. Often seen mulling over ordinary things, Sheena also loves tending to the soil or soaking some sunshine on tropical sea shores.
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