Three Poems by Shinjini Bhattacharjee

Me o' Clock

 

The day see-sawed into night

And I, standing at the edge of the fulcrum,

saw the moon rise again

into nothingness.

Cactus breath and heartbeat drops

falling into

dreary ice wallpapering the

insides of my eye.

My mind karaokes to the tune of

the waves and the winged moths

behind the bushes.

My voice peels itself to reveal the

tortured body of the shriek within.

My bare feet the daughters of

illegitimate ecstasy and misbegotten inhabitants

of the forest floor .

The blue colored tendrils from the ocean

climb up the cliff,

gift-wrap my body and soul into a

haloed hug, overpowering me.

 

Life is best experienced as a freefall.

 

 

 

 

I to Eye 

 

I woke up as a hallucination

Wrung my brain dry

Squeezed it so hard

The bomb wires exploded.

Rotten memories hanging

From the weather beaten tissues

Like forgotten stalactites.

 

Words rest on a

Broken lexical bed

In a tavern forever lost

Tired after long carrying

The air which miscarried

The fragrance that

The sun smothered flowers

Gave it during the Ice-Age.

 

You asked my parched throat

To find a mirage in the chimney.

Told me to find a shrink in the

Blank pages of the diary

You gave me.

 

I stand alone on stage,

While the devils give me

A standing ovation.

 

 

 

 

Crunchy Wound

 

Your past tense breath delves among the ruins of the countries you and I made on the straw ball tuning the wind chime. Bare arms bloom in the meadows where swan breath cracks open every cell to let in glass shaped thistle veins germinate on the asphyxiated soil clinging to the vanishing feet of dinosaurs. Shadows of the branches bookmark your cave mouth walls scratched with the alphabets I never understood. We hammer the moon with the light of the sun. See the bruises? These are the creeks made by the diapered tears placed in wooden coffins. You warm your hands by placing them in the charred staircase of your jaw, where palm tree mirages drop dead like sparrows on a hot day. Call the warped ambulances to sinew our atrophied hands with Orpheus lute, because your hair carries my voice to the Bermuda triangle, the unwashed rock below the curve of the question mark. The bedroom floor avalanches stairs into the maroon carpet below, opening out into a cliff of hoarse lullabies. The bulbs dim to turn memories into silhouettes. An eagle swoops down and carries the sun away.

Shinjini Bhattacharjee holds an M.A degree in English Literature and is a self professed jabberwocky who loves to explore the poems garbed in emotions of varied hues every moment of her life composes. Her works have been published in, or are forthcoming in The Stray Branch, Nostrovia! Poetry,White Ash Literary Magazine, and Four and Twenty Poetry, among others.