the loom of leisure

we gorge ourselves on love not thinking about tomorrow/there’s never enough time/to make you full/never enough flesh to fill your skin/we open our mouths for stories/for sun-tinted histories and swallow each other whole/here in this place with no room for mercy diaspora secrets, we enclose in pregnant pauses/write on the walls of unwanted wombs/invisible-ink poems in the margins of bodies/living out a map of a place called No Homeland

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

you got to forgive yourself for hurting. you got to remember that your heart is not a clenched fist your heart is not a bruised face your heart is a mango full to bursting with sunlight oh sticky heart, smooth substance, there is joy in your aching, refuse to surrender the memory of your flavour. delicious heart, refuse to forget. boy, you got to love the girl in the boy in the girl in the boy in you in you in you.

i was made far away / & born here / after all the plants died / after the earth was covered in white / i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles beneath the ocean / i am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl / part poltergeist

Not only did he hardly speak, but Pran’s footsteps were also soundless, and so mute was his presence that Chareeya thought of hanging a cat’s bell around his neck to signal his approach so they wouldn’t have to endure mutual shocks when he appeared suddenly behind her. But, in actuality, Chareeya always knew when Pran was within a ten-metre radius; in the same way that laundry hung on a line to dry outside retains that halo of balmy sunlight, she could sense an ethereal, tender aura, invisible but perceptible, almost like a fragrance pasteurised in the air.