My double sits before me now. I stare deep into her, as I do every day after midnight. When I raise my hands, she raises hers.

Even though I only once traced your streets with my own feet,
you wandered into my dreams anyway
sliding in through my grandmother’s stories,

She wills his brush in colour
and chalking, fierce hued flaws,
which fall flat on the canvas

He thought his heart was broken yet the day began again.

We were on my pink love seat
skin touching skin
I was drunk but longing
circled me, like stars
from a cartoon head wound

So what if there’s a dead patch.
Remember the havoc
unfettered fire makes –

My Lord, let the record show
she remembered everyone else
before this. If you must, take her
in teaspoons

I wasn’t to know
that it was a three-tusked
beast; that there was not one,
not two, but three
that grew the seed of me.

On her first day home, she took
to plucking the sky with tweezers—
latched on to clouds and waited