Am I too much

a bellowing unfinished story in your throat

One built big from a lifetime of wide rifts and blindfolds

One that inches to your eyes and wants to gush tears

otherwise

Am I not enough. This tree not yet formed in your belly reminds you of times slip sliding into the edge of a lake that wanted

all of you and took you in belly and body

Am I just enough for you to count the stars in my eyes and pull the roots around your waist and chest

a life jacket you never thought you would need

Not enough to hold the whole pain in you. The loss that blooms like a lotus against folded space

where nothing beautiful ever grew.

I could take it all. All of it. Roots belly throat

make it mine.

Launch myself, rocket fast into other orbits and drop the depth of your sorrow into cavernous unknowns and never look back

The question is…are you ready for this? This open wound bearing down on you asking that you see all of it, the dying beauty always on the edge of its end. Know the cruelty of all of it and see love love love in all things

I come with nothing. These hands with petals and a pen, a bird slowly climbing from my chest, want so much to hold you in, hold things down and carve the moon’s melancholy outside your circle, a talisman, so you can spin a story, grab everything in its path and make the end of us yours.

Enough so I can watch myself lose you and know you as the only one

Who grew like a storm in my gut.

We grow from cracks,
where sunlight staggers,
a patch of silver-green defiance,

Studying it, I am beneath the earth’s skin.
My own roots twist.

becoming becoming becoming

Could I alone hold the ache of what was buried,
and the fire of what awakens?

Could I give away these breasts,
curled fists on my chest
hidden in shadows,
a whisper between my hands.

They called me healer once,
an alchemist, an artist
of my own body, a reshaped truth.

You and I

at the threshold—
neither seed nor ash,

but the bloom that straddles both,
an outstretched hand to what aches and another

to what dreams.

This transition burns and implodes,
I cradle it still,
leaves singing to the moon

roots weeping into the soil.

There is no misery here.

I have tasted joy—
not as an end,
but as fleeting moments

give me just one moment of grace

Mugwort,
balm for what the world has split,
witness to the blaze of being,
whisper to those who suffer—
you are not alone
you are not alone
you are not alone.

you are everything
that has ever dared to grow.

ANKI

Come in. Sit.

It has not been easy

It’s better nowhere. You say. But it sounds like a question about here, where you want to be whole

In a world of parts.

I know things seem impossible

I’m glad you are here

I am happy to see you

I can’t imagine this world without you

Drink the water. Throw your shoulders back. Raise your head.

Giving up is a distant game

A tired compromise that seemed likely as the light fades each day.

Thank you for giving up and returning

For giving up and arriving

For giving up and asking

Here

Where you are beloved and worth the long wait.

I am here now

For all my parts

For the stranger

The loon

The wolf and the witch

For love for kindness for attention

I am here now for that sludge

For the mud in the gutter

The reek of the forgotten

The sticky pungent mess of shame

I am here

For love lost

For love gained

For the shine, the splendid burst of my name

Drowned in the birth of one star

I am here.

Come out come out

Come in

I am here.

The sky slides off the horizon

Clouds scatter, birds rattle against the dome

I give myself the metal, wood, the stone

Root the reed

Pin the cloud

I am father, breaker, builder

I am mother, creator, composer

I am the pulse of both breeding an infinite

electric hum of forever

The thread of life , sown across eternity

Into this small limbed being

With arms of wind

Heart of fire

Bands upon bands of elemental desire

This fleshy toroid, trembling on the edge of union,

I raised myself man child woman

I praised my own blood’s ancestry

I made my own family

I mothered ideas,

I stood by the forest and saw it as mine

I entered

laid waste to

That coiling line in me

And gave my parts shredded to

a One who was all and nothing

There I was made

Neither father nor mother

A wide gaping fissure spitting

the void into the wind

Wanting

waiting

needing

to devour the world

and fold the sky.

Beyond

This thing in me, so ancient

older then god

Inside, it was,

above, around

always there

like a horizon

I was unnamed, unborn yet

this world called me things

I was not

even now, many names

take root, bloom,

fade and fall away

You see

I too was made of something else

before my mind became me

this thing beyond

an eternity

an all

an edge and end

where we begin

Finally, you stop. This heat sinks thick around you.

You collect the broken parts that have returned as separate shards of meaning.

Some you tuck under your heart, others you tie like leashes to unsteady things.

Rest.

There is no running now.

You begin to wonder whether being there, not here for so many years was a kindness

Being here now, your body ripened and finally yours, feels unforgiving

You remember the caves in the old country. The way you hurled your voice and waited for its return, imagining there were more of you to love.

You thought of the way they sat and sat, the men of dirt and air, catching words from the sky.

They said

They knew your name

They knew who you would love

When you would love

And for how long

They knew which disaster marked which year of whose life and whose hands would reach for you and whose love would make you whole and for how long.

Things already written kept you safe and hidden.

Now, it is all here.

Every bit of love laid bare,

every voice that would have called your name out of the night, each one you have answered, again and again, until the name was no longer yours.

No need to run now, the space under your skin itches. Everything is here. Stubborn, hot and restless.

The cloud is pinned

The sun is pinned

Nothing moves

Everything fades

all is known.

After the last love.

I gave the surgeon permission
to lift each breast
to check each lower boundary

My gaze fixed on his face,
I feel comfortable with him.

The range of my vision
catches the edges of body
areola too large, mass of flesh
too prominent

as always, numb to touch.

How long can one live
outside the body?

Mystics and magicians find ways
to float, disappear, conjure
things that are not;
hide things that are there.

And I have made parts of this peculiar arrangement of bones
disappear for 45 years
allowing fragments to enter my mind –
limbs, a muscle, face, hair
abstractions I accept as mine.

At times my magic is to slide
into spirit, wear it
like a body, so easily untethered.

He parts each breast to the side;
confirming the aesthetics of tissue,
position of nipple, length of the cut.

I am back to his face.
One can get so used to enduring
to ignoring
to waiting outside a door to a place
you could call home

and wonder
what bleak quarrel with nature drove you out
what terrible
false will of the world kept you there.

I am not a magician,
nor a mystic, a trickster,
an illusionist.
There is nothing special here.

Mostly I am a traveler,
palm pressed on any door,
willing to enter a place
I can call my own.

Anki Sinha