Water logging
I think about the mornings it saved me
to see children, splatter the Bombay monsoons
with paper boats, their miniature palms folding
into their mothers’, two sizes too big, their raincoats
with dewy edges, hanging at the mercy of pastel plastic
clips. Zigzagging through a row of chipped roof huts,
the wiper of my second-hand purple car, outstretched
groaning its rubbery groan to drive away water from the road
ahead: cloud-gray, washed out, slipping into its own
bends; like a body being reborn when it lets itself break
down in full public view, each hawker and beggar negotiating
their wishes under the tick-tock of limited dry hours, flooding
this city, my heart, a closed island with eighteen million
impulses stirring, pumping in and out of crevices, to find refuge
under the radii of tin shelters or the hemline of an umbrella.
Inside, a water cooler sweating itself in the waiting
room, the slow drip of glucose reaching mother’s veins, my hand
turning another blotted page, as Kundera says, love is the longing
for the half of ourselves we have lost. One abandoned shoe
floating in the slight rainbows of puddles. The doctor shaking
his pen as he talks about options. Does the sky know of all it lets go
all it holds back and do my eyes? Walking through it all waist deep,
students wading with backpacks over their heads, every lane
& by-lane, a canopy of escape routes. A 12-inch flat screen
TV being banged from the side. Intermittent cable service
and flashes of a news anchor lady asking the weatherman
for a statistic on the water harvested thus far.
|
Preeti Vangani is an Indian writer & an MFA candidate at University of San Francisco. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in BOAAT, Public Pool, Juked, Lines+Stars, and Knicknackery, among others. She’s a spoken word poet and has been performing at many local San Francisco events including Voz Sin Tinta and Kearny Street Workshop.
|