Fiction & Poetry
SPREAD. BUT NOT READ I feel like you walk over me, all over me, Your gait was long and…
The governing eyes throughout history have dictated the acceptable forms of the performance of sex.
Days upon days rushed by, tatoh chiya, alu thukpa, chicken cowrie, and beer kept us warm during the rejections.
Why does the gap feel so wide no matter how much I explain, again and again, that I do not mean to hurt him… hurt any of them? I feel torn… but Amma and Appa need my help at home. Lockdown has been so damn hard.
I see people and places,
Couples and crushes
I hear giggles and whispers.
These are the secrets untold to me.
“Life’s too small without freshly cut coriander
Generously sprinkled on kadhai chicken.
Mint leaves blitzing their way with tomatoes
Ripe from the vine to the fingers dripping chutney –
Fragrances of earth between all this concrete.”
We carve strangers’ words onto our skin
like tattoos to be flaunted while hiding away
everything that we are from within.
“She rightly read the moment while I stumbled through a second-hand text.” – Jeanette Winterson But second-hand texts lay…
Aria walked into her school’s auditorium, giggling with the rest of the girls, because they were about to have their very first Sex Ed workshop.
I would once again be theirs, in memory, on the day my lover would die.
That’s all the big roles and ethics
All there to fulfil.
Another task,
Another box to tick
Another concrete path to rush
Quick, simple and straight.
All I have known of loving men is emotional labour, And by that, I mean back-breaking, soul-sucking toil, Oh, the relief of carrying nothing but yourself, Oh, the relief of taking nothing but pleasure from their sex