she saw him. walking the streets— her heart stopped from the periphery.

My thoughts are transient but the feeling…it is perpetual. When I say perpetual, I mean like the screams outside my door.

The opposite of girl-love is girl-hate.

It is not that you have a crush on her. She is as straight as the day is long and has a boyfriend for what? Three years now? Four?

All around me women are brick laying. Hand filthy from mortar, fingernails red from the clay they packed together to mold their fortress.

a cheap pink plastic rose and I board the train.

He minds the screaming kettle, silentious and steady, measured in teaspoons of amber clover bouquets

*Breeding ground for ill nurtured men* The day i found a suicide letter in mother’s room. Mine thought about committing suicide

I knew what she meant, but I can't help but think “Missus”: the misstep of the Missus.

My frail mother cries into a fishbowl then, drinks it down in a gulp.

where I come from— women wear blood-thick awlta on their feet, it fills up the cracks on their soles like Kaveri’s tributaries.

When I first write this story, my pencil snaps halfway through the first sentence I pick up another but a hand crumples me.

she said she only picks the half-grown ones a fig and lemon tree nursed past the delicate stages, a bonsai or begonia watered in a nursery

Doorways open in the gradient hour when light’s long fingers bend and the encantos slip from one realm to another dancing in the shadows

the first time she falls, you are there to catch her the second time, plants and tender keepsakes  break the fall

consider the marigold whose ripple petals & slight sweet scent repels pests seeking to feast on the cucumbers, melons, asters sharing soil.

In the reflection, silence wears my face, slinks behind my eyes, purrs as (I) ripple.

The healing plant, not just a folktale but one that sutures torn skin.

The blade of the flame flickers reflection on the edge of the lighter, eternal incendiary tool.

Oh, winged instrument, how you’ve always captured my heart into each string.