ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Snigdha Koirala is a poet and writer based in New York City. Her works have appeared in Wildness, Gutter, Dirty Paws Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a graduate student at NYU’s Centre for Experimental Humanities, where, amongst other things, she explores the sedimentation of history and violence in the English language.
Also by Snigdha Koirala:
longing so flawed
Nature Poem
January, night after night, I dream footage
of destruction. Pokhara: Machapuchare submerged.
The tail severed from the body. The tail flipping,
seconds before giving in. Its fall cracking
the nearing hills, lakes. And the most inconceivable
blue surges over the town. Swallows all but the land’s
white ribs, its ghosts flitting in the air,
their teeth hard as frozen pears. January, you walk
through a wooden door. Days later, I wake to write:
little to no snow present. As a girl, I watched
doorway after wooden doorway shut their mouths firmly.
Curfew in tact, air smothered to silence — how to hear
the babbler now, its wings against the wind? What is loss?
asks a wet bus stop sign, late one night. I offer:
my relentless homesickness. My home, sinking
and deluged. Desire? Snow upon snow, upon snow.
Days later I wake, thinking of you. Light pooling
on the floor, fish on your torso — a scar — flitting
to cross the sheets. Lately, the glaciers split into lakes,
each opening like the hour. Each opening ignored.
Lately, I fear the word open, the colour inside.
In Kathmandu, dust rises to a long haze,
each increment a rift from the Himalayas.
I am not there to bear witness. I bear witness, instead,
to the moon, bleeding through its edge; your name, glowing
in my mouth. L as in light, as in luck. What sickening
luck to watch each hour from a distance, each aperture.
To trace pigments of wreckage on a screen, then commit
to memory the last swimming fish. To spill into
bathwater, to relief. To say please and release. To rift
and sicken. To say I just I don’t want that dream
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
