When we arrived we didn’t say, I have arrived—
it was late on some accounts or none, depending.
Every light in the cottage engaged, I turned off
switch after switch, but so many remained.
And you did what you do to draw
fire from dormancy.
Your fingers on my wrist
—I decided on this—
the alarm detecting
more than implied heat—
a bra cast over
a fold out—
I sing to myself in the threshold of rain.
We wake to birds of unknown name.
Because you bring me trouble cloaked in sorrow, bathed in fear
I ask you
to leave.
You are playing Franco playing Ginsberg, leaving no one
to play you.
That I led you to my river, my church—forgive me.
I wanted to drown
in something rapid.
Not you—your voice.
The inability to stay
Silent.
If you are coherent, then I am a misplaced apricot.
Too long
I have been chasing my mind like a penguin lodged in a tree
during the rain.
There is simply no time for me
to save you.
My woods run deep as I erase the everything
that will not take place.
When God returns screaming
you might be slouched
over the kitchenette
that was always too low—
your thumb overtop
the Cirque de Soleil
in Sunday’s paper.
Maybe the wind
through the window
that never seals
will inform you: purple
underwear is not enough—
there are no leis
where you head only
thin bands
of elastic to remind
you of the girl
in high-school Spanish
who snapped her bracelet
to the tune
of La Cucaracha.
Maybe now you will
discover what
you always suspected—
the witches butter
that stained
the cedar orange
became the cedar
the elementary
teacher who insisted
caterpillars beget
blindness, returned
as moth that never
calibrates with bulb
or moon or you
might find yourself
without question,
facing the window.
Natasha Kochicheril Moni, a first-generation American born to native Dutch and Indian parents, writes and resides in the Pacific Northwest. In 2014, Natasha's first full-length poetry collection, The Cardiologist's Daughter, was published by Two Sylvias Press. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in over fifty-five journals including: Entropy, The Rumpus, Magma, Verse, DIAGRAM, Hobart, and Indiana Review.