Your Imaginary Slut
My voice is choked, my fingers numb
It's not cold, not melancholia either
As I massage coconut oil in your silvery hair
A slut in push-up bra dances in purblind fog
Her bangs blow through your hirsute fields
Rainclouds coil in her uncouth wiles,
firewood stirs in her brazen smiles
She sleeps with you, when I am away on a tour,
undresses online while I am asleep at your side,
Neither of you listen to the lay of receding tide.
Faraway, in the *krishnachura across the purple sun
a brainfever bird sings to the wet-brown scent of rain
Our Moments lay awake in anamnesic refrigerator
Who cares, if Alzheimer’s or the slut, walks our way?
*a large tree with red flowers
Afternoon
I turn the pages of our wedding album,
creepers coil around my coffee arms—
a blue snake hisses from your cigar
smoke curls out of your nostrils
like a song soaked in cyanide salt
The cat purrs outside the kitchen window
I collect the fish bones and mix them
with some leftover rice from our plates
The doorbell rings, our maid rushes in,
her sweat-ridden gait beelines
a whiff of distress—
Large ripples of tap water clutter
like rain drops on a parched tin shed
You draw the curtains to feel
the softness of watermelon cubes
I turn towards the empty wall and
hum old Hindi movie songs with
nap-shut lids, like a submerged isle
in the Gulf of Mannar
MS WORD
When the neighbourhood sleeps
I venture out in your blue light
to shut up the curious mouths
and retort the unfeeling eyes,
in unwaged Times New Roman
typing angst in double space—
Peace flows through the hollow
of self-sentenced exile,
I drift afar from the crowd of
plastic smiles and arsenic tears,
losing and finding the erratic me
in the true fiction of WORDS
on my patient laptop screen
Shyamasri Maji teaches English literature at Durgapur Women’s college in West Bengal
