everything i love is out to sea
glass-tooth morning.
salt mouth.
i left the stove on just to feel wanted.
the sea wrote back once—
in lowercase.
smudged.
untranslated.
i drank it anyway.
//
the sun fell behind me like
a dog you didn’t name.
didn’t stay.
i speak in splinters now.
no full words.
just
kitchen tile
cracks in the paint
the hum of things unplugged.
the mug is chipped.
the coffee’s been cold since ’06.
conversations curdle at the rim.
nobody drinks.
everybody talks.
//
i laughed at the funeral /
no one was there /
not even me
what i mean is—
i’ve been alive too long
in the wrong tense
& no one noticed
when i folded
my joy
like laundry
& forgot it
in someone else’s drawer.
//
i saw her—
knees to her chest,
eating a poem
like stale bread
with no butter.
still said thank you.
they call it healing
when you leave the wound open
& just name it sky.
//
everything i love is out to sea.
no letters.
no flares.
just
float.
drift.
unclench.
(i keep setting the table anyway.)
Sreeja Naskar is a poet from West Bengal, India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, Modern Literature, Gone Lawn, Eunoia Review, ONE ART, among other literary journals. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.