Distractions from the Sun-Lit Corners of Love

By Kalyani Bindu

This is How I Knew

 

This is how I knew:

You even subverted my mornings.

 

Morning air cracked in shy slivers
from the pith of your nose
legs opened triangular bird mouths
spewing clairvoyant basilisk lizards
walking in hot algae-ridden pee
finding waterways for veins in fiery calm
to read mishaps like seers in bugs
flipping in the gravel and bone of my eyes.

 

You dawned on me like an impostor of my morning.

 

This is how I really knew:
a sentinel shadow of a "coo"
drumming under your breath—
a skeletal vestige of a fatal hoot
from your nocturnal haunt,

Now you know.

 

Our Filamentous Sorrow.

By Kalyani Bindu

 

Colonizers return over seas of filamentous sorrow
(a convenient sail across time that heals),
fingering weak spurts of weeping mucus like studs—
impostor sons likening waves to grit in words
lulling daylight off in sneaky sling bags of etiquette
to torch nights with fatal songs,
trebles in convenient limbos
like shadows like creepers on limbs
conveniently there—
impostor sons in our filamentous sorrow.

 

Kalyani Bindu from India worked at the intersection of neuropsychiatry and informatics in the Indian Institute of Science, and is currently in Japan on a stint to study anxiety in non-human primates. Two Moviegoers was her first poetry collection. During her time as a columnist (The Occasional Owl) in White Crow Art Daily, she wrote articles revolving around socio-cultural themes. Her poems and essays have appeared in Variant Literature Journal, Madras Courier, Muse India, Indian Review, Ethos Literary Journal, White Crow Art Daily, Modern Literature, Navalokam, Bhashaposhini and the Indian Express