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Walking on Marine Drive at Midnight

Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Harshal Desai, 2016.

for H

The sea cuts its mouth open
and gurgles a lullaby for the

sleepless. The cities we love
grow in different dialects and

forget old dreams. Briefly,
the sky appears unreal in its

tincture of fermented molasses
on its surface. In the midnight

air, our bodies are lighter. The
sky imagines itself into becoming.

We smell bread from the midnight
bakery and I compare it to the risen

tide. You underline the city line on
air and peer through dark to trace the

deciduous layers of sky, earth, and sea.
You point toward the lengthening

space between three silences. We see
the sea gasp for ether in a cusp of

unbridled yearning. The moon makes
it possible. We are a silhouette of

shadows braided into a mosaic of oneness.
There is no language for the sudden

blooming of buds into flowers on the
street-walk, or how their color reminds

me of a sound that reverberates like the
Arabian sea, like birds released into the sky.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a recipient of the Charles Wallace fellowship 2019 at the University of Stirling, Scotland. She is a GREAT scholarship awardee and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and a poetry reader for Palette Poetry.