By Pragya Bhagat

thirsty for love

i love you

i love you
sometimes, you may think i don’t or i can’t
or i won’t but consider this, i love you

like van gogh’s yellow sunflower, how it eats the air and
claws through clouds and slides
through light, he didn’t dab
his love on the canvas, he smeared it from palm
to elbow, sacrificed his ear because what else
can one offer but the ability to listen, i love you so hard
i dream of your death every week, a ritual embedded
in the fabric separating space and time, you

are chopin’s piano and mehdi hussain’s harmonium
and leonard cohen’s suzanne, and i
am the clock on their walls
ticking across generations, skipping across oceans
that couldn’t bear the burden of belonging
so they coughed up mermaids onto islands
and colonisers on the peninsulas next to them

these men bearing flags were thirsty for love
they were raised on gray mud and sugar cavity
they decayed before they were born
and when their mothers nudged them onto
the battlefield they looked for excuses to touch
each other, and they cried because their bodies
became their teachers, and each river of blood
was an ode to love, was violent

like the time Beethoven could no longer listen
to his own music but he wrote it anyway
so when you hear the ninth symphony, with closed eyes
and thumping heart, head dunked in ice
water, a star swimming in a galaxy
when you hear it like he did, neurons
will firework into colour and crackle and
you will grow so hungry you will eat
the air and claw the clouds and slide through light, this
is what love is

a symphony
a sunflower
a silent letter
a violent dream
a welcome that never ends
a farewell that never arrives

dystopian fantasy #26

in the future we might dissolve marriage, citing
its inability to offer consolation in the brief
moments when a voice whispered remember me

it might become an effective footnote in an essay
celebrating compromise, but nothing more than
a relic, really, because footnotes are for the suspicious
and once we wiggle out of ritualising possession
we might, at last, trust ourselves

in the future there might be parties
in parks and plazas, where women dance without
worrying about how loose their

character
words
arm jiggle
belly
braid

tight their

smile
jeans
hymen
ponytail

and these women might elasticise into a being wider
than their bodies put together, and wilder
than their uncombed hair combined

this being might manifest into the baghor stone
where our foremothers worshipped the feminine
eight thousand years before christ convinced us
a man was in-charge

if the future holds such promise we might find new
ways to be where daughters aren’t drowned in milk
and brides aren’t burnt because their ash is
worth more than their bodies, and in this future

mothers become queens that rule the world, and girls
ask boys to the prom, and girls ask girls to the prom
and girls take themselves to the prom, because in this world
a girl can be her own headquarter and fill
her own blanks with questions and riddle her wonder
against bulletproof glass and her first thought of the
day isn’t who’s watching but what’s possible
in the future, we might resist and deny and eventually
learn to love such a world, and when we
do, we won’t blame our politicians or schools, we’ll wonder
why it took so damn long

a poem that’s not about me

write a poem, he says
that’s not about you

he curves away from his pen
head hangs over screen like
a teardrop

a frown dimples his unibrow
he knows i’m looking
he smiles

some days, we are knotted crusade
today he’s archive, i’m minister
he’s flower, i’m georgia

this poem, i insist, isn’t about me

Pragya Bhagat’s work focuses on the intersections between belonging, body image, and mental health. Her poetry has been anthologised in Bookends by Kommune (2019), City 7, A Journal of South Asian Literature (2019), and Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing: Volume 7 (2020). Her work has been featured in The Open Road Review, the BBC, Helter Skelter, Platform Magazine, The Bombay Review, the Huffington Post, The Bengaluru Review, The Better India, The Wire, Qrius, and the Free Press Journal. She is a recipient of the 2018 Orange Flower Award, the 2019 Sakhi Awards, and won the 2020 Bound Short Story Contest. She is currently working on a book forthcoming from Zubaan publishers.

Banner image by Ewelina Karbowiak and downloaded from unsplash.com