Gaia Rajan
ISBN: 978-1-949099-10-2
"Can Gaia Rajan just tell us every story? With a voice that is forever lyrical yet foreboding, Rajan is the present and the future of poetry. Moth Funerals is a stunning debut that urges us to retell our own futures: this is the future where the love story is rewritten, where godless girls are safe, where these remarkable girls build their own dollhouses and every single one of their worldly wants is quenched, and where these girls are more than just a lyric to a song — in fact, they don't just rule the song — they rule the world. This collection urges us to escape our frameworks and reconstruct right now. Gaia Rajan gives me power."
— Dorothy Chan, author of Revenge of the Asian Woman and Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold
Glass Poetry Press
Precision · Vision · Inclusion
Moth Funerals
Cover by Darius Serebrova
$8.50
Sample poem from Moth Funerals:
Poem In Which I Do Not Become A Bird
I like how the internet unfurls when you consider dying —
how every website breaks open to offer
phone numbers, statistics, names, how you look out
into the streetlights and imagine everyone clutching their breath,
same as you. How all your pockets are weighed
with sea, how when the hotline is yours
finally a bodiless voice whispers it gets better,
which is what people say when they do not know
what to do with their hands. Your thoughts ache
a bestiary of wings and teeth and how
your friend died on a river. Then the dream
where he is alone with an armful of birds,
and they are leading him closer to the water —
never mind. I don't want to think about the birds who died
of blunt force trauma, the birds who disappeared
during his last rites, the birds reminding me I am
wingless. Have you ever seen
an armful of birds? I like metaphors because they unflight
humanity, turn it to godhood. I know
the truth. His death was his death, his life his life, the birds
just birds, I surrender
my weapons. I forfeit my mouths. The road
is strewn with rain and cars, and I am not a metaphor,
I'm just a girl kneeling small enough to live
for a moment, the city's breath feathered
as I bury my pleas in the dark.
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Gaia Rajan lives in Andover, MA. She's the Managing Editor of The Courant and a Poetry Editor for Saffron Literary. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in diode, DIALOGIST, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, Hobart, Rust+Moth, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Moth Funerals, is forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press in fall, and she is a National Student Poet semifinalist. She is sixteen years old, and tweets @gaia_writes.
