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.

Your hands now in my chest rearrange my heart,

then my lungs.

Old chains I exchange for soft cuffs, an agreement we made over breakfast.

First, you gently pull apart wrists and ankles, my center, soft hard

meets you

Still split, I am anchored.

Your bed, a spit of wood over fire, from where I turn

You play my ribs.

Your fists, mallets, pound 

sounds of metal on metal 

reach my inner ear

And I am underwater.

Your calculated surge meets my desire,

pain breeds pain

behind my heart, such tender cruel creatures

they nestle and wrestle, 

leap from my spine.

and when I think I cannot bear 

your ageless love anymore

You find the hollow

below my clavicle 

a door handle 

you grab and push,

force open a room 

for me to see behind 

this ancient trick of god.

The Illusion. Here, where

desire and death are one.

Where pain is the promise of life.

Where Love is always Play.

And salvation,

an imperceptible,

tricky thin, slippery tear, 

from where your arms appear

to hold me as I cry

come through an abyss

of saliva and tears,

this bliss of fleshy fear

falling free,

releases me.

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

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.

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

My father and I walk along Snake Trail Canal,
he landed a few days ago with my mom,
both rattled by failing memories,
endured on those long flights from Delhi to Miami, aging bodies scrambled from the crack in distance and time.

My father talks about time and how much of it has passed
and how he could have used it gracefully
He says he is living on borrowed time,
his “quota is over.”

I listen.
My father regrets many things.
I search for the same feeling —
that uneasy bitter weight
under the throat.

Instead, I find the weightless certainty
that our separation,
my necessary fatherless journey,
my queerness, my own flight
was just so,
just right.

Here we are
under dappled light,
wet tree roots like fingers
pluck the sun’s glimmer
from the canal’s dark water,
I turn his collar down and he flicks his
hand across one shoulder
as if to unburden himself.

my arm rests around him as we gaze into everyday oblivion,
muscovy ducks shuffling
around our feet.

afternoon joggers scuttling by

There is nothing I can say to soothe him
take on that well-worn role of the comforter
the caretaker, just a child who learned how to survive
using hands and words and mind to fix, to carry
that which was not mine.

My father and I haven’t spoken for a long time, and now it doesn’t matter for how long.
when I was younger, I would go years without hearing his voice
so I am used to it and manage my time as reflection and respite
from being what I am not with him.

But that day when the water, the trees,
sky and tiny creatures of the world
surrounded our insignificance,
I felt a hidden joy
the pleasure of finding him again,
decades later,
as I am

as I always want to be
whole, true and tender.

Anki Sinha