Poetry: Suchita Parikh-Mundul

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I Collect Grandmothers

I collect grandmothers like flowers
yours, mine, everyone’s
once they’ve been plucked from the earth
after they’ve wilted and shriveled
in provincial flower pots
or upcycled urban glass bottles
I gather their corpses
and lay them between my favourite books
so they flatten like the pages that hold them
so words that matter are imprinted
onto their petalled faces
their leafy hands
their stalk-like limbs
so that each time I miss the comfort
of a grandmotherly embrace
I can come back to these
preserved bouquets
and read their wisdom
trace their life
hold their history
touch their love
enmeshed between dying breaths
and eternal knowledge
so that when I speak of them
to my children
their petals fall from my mouth
onto their heads
and they can gather them
and start over.

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Morning News

the day splinters
like a rotting shard of wood
a spoke in the eye of morning
as the news filters in
you pull up the bag of skin
holding bones together
sidestepping a brash sun
and arrange into
wayward patterns
scrolling through
disappointments
casting shadows on
the hours that stretch ahead
phantoms haunt
and diffuse equilibrium
scattering fibrous clumps
along the ecosphere
in oblique fashion
the day is ruptured
its remnants settle into
hesitant breaths
making peace with
the tattered swathe of time
tentatively spread
mottled, frayed
I patch together
the fabric of hours
stitching quilts of hope
and get on with it.

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BIO

Suchita Parikh-Mundul is a freelance writer, copy editor, and poet. She has worked with magazines and websites. Her poetry has appeared in Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, online literary magazines Muse India, Cerebration, Hakara, The Pine Cone Review, The Quiver Review, and Plato’s Caves Online. Her work has been included in international anthologies. A collection of poems, Liquid Apnea, was published by Sampark, Kolkata, in 2005.

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