Jyothsnaphanija

SNAKES AND CANDLES

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You heard many open ended stories of snakes and candles.
Snakes half human,
Candles half soft.
Candles spoof snakes,
Snakes tint candle footprints on the table
as plastic flowers overnight.
From your dream bed,
They crawl towards the curtain.
Hold the keys,
Label each tree,
The fume scents each flower,
Toxic blaze frisks through the castles, ladders, ropes,
xanthodontous combs,
opiate moistured frails of wet fingers.
You proofread the fairytales.
Typeset, those wild gossips,
Pencil them, sharpen their hair,
Insert moon for them
to see,
the squeezed seasons at ripples
Ophidian torch
magnetic at the incus.

* * *

PUDDLE BY THE SECRETS

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I am nostalgic of feathery cots under the windless sky,
Bed time stories outside home,
Summer dreams hover,
Flower girl quivers under the tree, singing rain songs,
Faces of men and women before the cockcrow, clipped in tractors,
Dry porridge on trenchant grass,
Green semantics, conventions in gossips.
I can see the name of our paradise in electronic maps.
But no idea how,
All the lights in each home, instructively get switched off,
When blue murmurs of stars reach their mystic wind,
Snakes dance, palm trees converse,
Curd sleeps, wounds pierce,
Flowers weave papery baskets.
Then, my village turns it's darkness on, towards the magnetic sky.
The puddle hungrily eats the night and swallows the ropes hugged to the necks.

* * *

SUNRISE*

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Sunrise with its usual lazy orographic eyelids,
Shades the pale sky where,
Misspelled signboards,
Heavy oxygen,
Confusing maps,
eavesdrop,
when
Unreturned ones,
Amuse at their half forgotten memories,
Etched in the expeditions.

* Originally published in Northeast Review.

Jyothsnaphanija is a PhD research scholar in English Literature at EFL University, Hyderabad, India. Her poetry has appeared in Melusine, Muddy River Poetry Review, CounterPunch, American Diversity Report, Coldnoon, Luvah, Kritya, and in Magnets and Ladders, among several others. Her short stories have appeared in eFiction India, her research articles have appeared in Subalternspeak, eDhvani, Wizcraft, Barnolipi , and in several books. Her disability is congenital visual impairment. She blogs at phanija.wordpress.com.