Horizontal Mirror

M.Torrez

Mother,
I make fire.
from toe to toe-
Horizontal shivers.
Mother- you ask 'Who am I'?
I ask the same-
the inheritance of glory
is perhaps a groaning knock?

I am a walking grief-
a cotton swab dipped into a dangling hymn
an adjective which stands nude-
s
t
r
a
i
g
h
t 
      in  
parrallelism .
    Mother, what are these things around me?
These objects, people- fungus in pickles-
spit it out, immediately-
spit and spat-

You have an eye of an ocean yet you are all dry,
bearing negations for an absolute face of mine
you replicate me mother, or do i do you?
Is my face not enough?
Is my weakness too shallow?
Mother! Oh glorious victory-
You know all of it.
You do.
You do.
You do.

Growing up

I realize I am growing old

with my mother’s home prepared coconut oil,

pressed flowers on the sheets.

I sleep next to her

almost like a ritual now,

I realize

when she mumbles softly in her sleeps

the childhood was different-

It was full of prayers, folk songs, odes, laments.

I see her sleep walking now-

abruptly between the noises in her head

amidst the empty pale rooms,

Circling

Walking

Sitting

I see her sleeping with deep breaths,

a hard name to remember-

I realize, I am growing too old now

to witness the melancholy,

to paint my fingers in the sea of dementia.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Thinking of a Christmas gift? My poetry collection is receiving all the love for which I am truly thankful to each one who supported it. I produced my book out of pain, love, despair. Hope you like it too. Links can be checked out here-

Crimson skins

Crimson Skins- India

An ode to my mother

My mother has paper lips / beautiful, stale pages of love rubbing against each lip.
She sings a dream of a crochet bag, each night, the times when I am unwell.
My mother often dresses in saree that is obscure and restless,
a brown hem of her dress slightly caressing my face.
And I begin to decode her fears/ her prayers/ her clandestine sins.
She is a slime ball of crisp yellow frustration leaking.
A palindrome.
Oh, mother, you creature of a goddess!
Your feverish footstep of laid back dreams/ a word which you often can’t pronounce.
You are too strong and surreal to gulp,
with a staircase lost somewhere in your hair-bun,
you walk in your nylon ivory night dress,
fidgeting throughout the pathway.
You stumble and walk.
still, you walk, mama.
A birth giver to stars.
You own this starry night, behind the loop of your ear ring,
too small and fancy
voicemails lost in this sky so empty.
Your foot my home, mother.
My poem your sleep.

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Latest work
https://vitabrevisliterature.com/poems/a-satisfaction-poem-by-devika-mathu/

no reasons

cold hands meet me like temples,
adjoining bodies of splash.
a mother, a sister,
a verb, a noun,

it all begins with me,
a feverish touch of mine,
endless spots of joy and birth.
a door often conjures murmurs.

continuous, ephemeral drops of dreams,
hanging like autumn leaves,
a transitory position slips beneath me.
i stay quiet as a hawk,

pure as hot wax.
A body rocks its arms in blue stench,
and i bask in.
for there are things growing, a weed
for no reason.

---

hope you are doing great.
P.s My recent poetry got published here.

Link to my poem in this amazing anthology
can be checked out on amazon.

 

 

I float like a spot

i see you spreading like blob of colors
sunset inside your mouth,
a hundred nights of sickness grows.
somewhere, arms growing like a living room.
mother, your chin spewed chemicals,
on the night I was born.
1:00 am. a night that swallowed both of us.
You carried varicose time on your sickening waist,
like time made you of clay.

and you heard my voice of lace mucus.
screams growing like fingernails.
you said i must grow, where ever planted.
mosaic pieces stuck to my pharynx.
big- boned, thin legged,
i am 26 today mother, i still bleed,
the way you did last night.
am i you? or life is ingested like you
into my system.

i try shutting my eyes,
inhaling,
inhaling
inhaling.
a thing you detached from your wrist.
_______________________________

As I Pray

Resolute flames of candle burn on my windowsill

catching your white still fierce memory laughing in the atmosphere,

Tonight, I rebuke the ashes and the time of Thar

to halt, a clock eating another clock somewhere

If I slit tomatoes with you, you shall give me memories and formations.

For you create footsteps and geometry,

Carrying your dainty artistic eyes in the paintings of my body

I replicate you, I replicate your duties, Mother

And I learn the process of Catharsis from your bellybutton

I sew your words to my hairdo, swaying

singing your touch around,

And I pray and pray

like rainbows touching a slice of paradise.

For, I shall always be You.

---

P.S – To my everything, my Mother.

---

©MVS

Mother, I see you.

pinterest

With hallucinating fingers of forecasting
I counted your skin and your mouth and I counted you

Your mouth poured water on my soiled heart, almost a surreal thing.
And you buttered my hair, my lips, my hips
with cerulean droplets of your vintage mirror.

I saw you taking vodka and pills while sobbing
near the cliff, near the swollen ebb,
near the Earth
to see him departing you and bisecting you
like old cassettes and used carpets
he played the keys of the mundane monopoly game,
Oh, I saw you circling your eyes
with oceans of thunders and clinging dirt

you ate so ferociously the whole dinner by yourself
like you wanted nothing but this food
and the platter was already full of brass and copper.
Mother, mother, mother
I see a soliloquy of sustenance sinking
right on the joints of your tongue
and extending deep down to your tottering chipped toenail

I have drunk the milk your poured me
rummaging the past bonds, the past sorrows
like the splitting of peas and dicing of peas.

I always wanted to surround you, Mother
And then, the time came I saw you emulsifying
Saturating and desiccating
With a cigar in your mouth, you wanted to bleed prayers
Ransacking these walls of thesis and soft love
you wished to melt and melt and melt

I sat and saw you, still scavenging your unsaid words
your love, your molten body
like Jaipuri studded skirts.
I wanted to weep and splash reality that day
in the spirits of my hallucinating verses.

But, you did not care Mother,
You melted anyway.

©MVS

---

 

The-wisdom- is- her

Mother: You are a hyperbole of the moon and the star, a hubris of soliloquy.

Like floating wax, you extend your skin to my mouth, forming chains of bewilderment

chains of congruence     chains of mammoth frills of hope.

You lie in the darkest of hours with a sparkle of holy water on your chin, the pink chin,

the orange chin, the grey chin where all the clandestine secrets are packed between

your teeth and the parched lips, you give blossom to my hair extending to my curves

the scarlet, metamorphosis pattern of face

Opulent serenity lies in your blood, I see my reflection

Time, death or a crooked  tree, you put embroidery incumbent to survive the veracity,

harsh or simple.

Objects around you become opaque, hollows of orange skies

squares of white ice, the eye of Satan

I absorb all the conjectures knitted in the black of  your eyes

to the stars in your magical touch

the fidelity to produce a seed: a seed I shall carry

a seed I may fail

your liquid, pale truth of surviving I inhale in the morbid tales of summer

only to form the web of ink and paper burning inside your motionless,

sturdy, an amalgamation of Supreme Ant  intoxicating, all pouring inside

basket of void, dulcet, a white star.

---

---

 

A place like this

The epitome of peach shaped markings,
Defining the extended fields of valour and hope,
Drooling in my walnut bones,
Mingling in my solitary ebb,
Lies inside a place where my mother
Wakes me up from a cascading nightmare.
To the jubilant staircase of rainbow meadows,
To catch an intrepid molecule of a butterfly
Then to drink a cup of valour,
As I see a place like this
Rupturing, beaming.
Flickering amidst the stars in the sky.