Small White Ball
BY LEE JENNY TRANS. ARCHANA MADHAVAN
There is a window and a mirror and candlelight and a teakettle and one cup. My breathing is scattered like a shipwreck. A water droplet falls from somewhere. I don’t have the strength to stop this life from taking on water. Your two eyes, closed. Right eye, left eye. I want to see your eyes. Once, just once. That time your eyes met mine there was something I wanted to hear. There was something I wanted to say. But your dark pupils fade into a white light, into a white light, into the glass lens in your eyes you don’t even know you have. Time keeps moving backward and when I look up the water droplet has evaporated, gone. Those days of flowers and dreams and wing unfurlings make a mockery of me. In which pocket should we put that small white ball quivering at the corners of our eyes? Right pocket, left pocket. As if ridiculing sturdier objects, a boneless seasonal wind blows and buries itself into my chest. Even though I know in the end we’ll walk in the same direction, I grasp your hand firmly for its warmth. Your hand, like dry straw, was calm and so far away, all alone. This breathing, just this breathing that I never once properly considered. I trace the short life lines of your palm trying to stretch them longer and longer and when your breathing murmurs at last, a single pale hand drops from the bed. You become blurred, so blurred that you cannot blur anymore. You disappear, inner self inward or outer self outward. The world’s shadow grows abruptly dark and wide. Water droplets, water droplets, water droplets. In my pocket, bulging like a futile secret, is our small white ball. There is a window and a mirror and candlelight and a teakettle and one cup.
Coda Song
BY LEE JENNY TRANS. ARCHANA MADHAVAN
I wash my hands and my face grows shadowed. A night to fathom the depths of my own darkness. Old delusions and Coca-Cola, death metal and Kabbalah, the wetness filling my ear canal and our faint pinch harmonics. My guitar, like it possesses too many hearts, taut with tension on the verge of snapping. My fingering technique with my stubby little pinky, tripping and limping like it’s doing a dance. Silence, which means before the silence there was sound. Too many hearts suffocate us. Just as we thought, pushing forth from end to end is the reason for our premature aging. You cried like a rectangular girl and your sharp corners pierced me through without heed. Eyes open wide, I go in and out of dreams and then drink and smoke and drink and smoke again. I feel like I’m committing a sin every time I go looking for poetic verse. Separated from myself, my anxiety slips poetically over an icy ground of utterly unpoetic language. I resolve not to kill myself for now, same as yesterday. This place is too dark, your concept too cruel, and you’ve never put me in a place I wanted to be. Decrescendo, decrescendo, coda song. What I wish for is a very small, vague thing. Not to flee from myself even for a second. And I wish always to remain composed but I’ve read far too many books in order to start revolutions and my conscience won’t allow me to recite the sight, and you slash your wrists, once again, like striking a match. A season to hurl abuses in our heads and turn our backs on each other. Like the bellows of an accordion expanding and contracting, it repeats: the heartburn and hunger and regret and repentance. I no longer have wings.