Wind Chime Petals I’m sorry

kittipong2016

Wind Chime

JOANNA GEORGE

A plunge, a dive, a strike into the hardened core –Tight with the passage of time, A raid through the morning blues An assault by the whimsy wind, scattering the mauve silence into a million possibilities, as the wind chime shook its statued posture from a mere decorative chandelier to spill the first tunes of melody of a welcome note.

The first time I saw her, she was wrapped in snowy baby clothes, barely opening her eyes and palms, but those little cheeks flushed red with life The next time she was clothed in some bleached outfit, She closed herself tight to the world, eyes, fist, mouth and everything that made her – closed to the world ……. closed tight as a period to a sentence.

It was during the in between periods of two years, the cerulean blue separating dusk and dawn, the color of her favorite dress that mom still preserves, where she opened her arms to let me, hold her to let me, hold her joy, while she kicked away my sorrows - my baby sister; She dribbled a pinch of her smile Her first one for me while pointing her tiny fingers to the wind chime,

a bitter sweet memory that will go on reverberating on the front porch with every wind ransacking the threads of my wind chime.

Joanna George writes from Pondicherry, India, recently her poems were short-listed for the Isele Poetry Prize. Her works appear or are forthcoming in Parentheses Journal, Hennepin Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Honey Literary, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, West Trestle Review, Epoch Press, and others. She tweets @j_leaseofhope.

Petals

JOANNA GEORGE

When the therapist asks me of the white sheet covering her face like the fluffy clouds suddenly over a bright noon sun, bringing in a shade of gloom over, I think of the colorful petals from her infanthood now filling the wooden casket –bridging the space between death and life, those petals as if spun on a color ring at the speed of light, transforming into a blind whiteness, lying like a margin around her petite figure, cuffing her body still from lifelessness never letting her to schools and books, colorless, lifeless bleached and placid suddenly like her….around her… on her…. petals she will never pick up for decorating the ten circles of our traditional attapookalam on harvest festival as she herself had already become the lamp at the center of the pookalam surrounded by circles and circles of petals My little sister on her way to the grave.

borojoint

borojoint

I’m Sorry

JOANNA GEORGE

I’m sorry my house is on fire and I live in it, I didn’t notice your text messages or missed calls. I’m sorry I was drinking this poison and trying to think a way to kill it, that I forgot you might be waiting, I’m sorry I look forward to cooking, despite the poison in me –a hope that my family will make it to lunch. I’m sorry that I came to you, leaning onto you whenever possible –for a slight whisper of hope in my vacuumed chambers of life that cultured itself to hold only silence in every space and matter; But I’m deeply sorry I didn’t notice you suffocating in my breathlessness, See? there is a lot of oxygen burning down my glass house, that we have very little left in our lungs. I’m sorry I can’t reach to you at times when I’m drowning in this fire, becoming it. And I’m sorry that I become this distant nebula –holding dust, gas and everything you find in a fire, while you keep waiting for me to collapse back into the star you always loved. But I’m not sorry that I can’t always be her, your exciting lover, there are times, I become the asbestos of my house, tolerating the fires of my father’s addiction from turning my home into stumps of sober ash.